Comment by speakfreely
Comment by speakfreely 2 days ago
My understanding is that they're doing this under the "expedited removal" provision of the 1996 IIRIRA law. If you've been in the US less than 2 years, arrived without inspection or at a port of entry with invalid documents, or don't have lawful resident status, you're subject to expedited removal. If not, you are entitled to an administrative immigration hearing.
For some context, under Obama in 2013, there were roughly 197,000 expedited removals (45% of ~432,000 total deportations). So this was widely used by DHS during the Obama administration. Nothing has changed except ICE policies about where people are permitted to be detained and where they are targeting people. Unless I'm missing something?
I'll be the first to admit they look like masked goons and entirely unprofessional grabbing people off the street in hoodies. It's horrible optics and is absurdly unprofessional. I completely disagree with the mechanics of how this is being carried out. But it's not unconstitutional or unlawful as far I can tell.
> But it's not unconstitutional or unlawful as far I can tell.
The problem is that you can’t tell: if they follow the law, you can be fairly confident that it is constitutional but when they’re rapidly deporting people without hearings and with officers actively resisting oversight, we have only their word that the people being deported do in fact meet those criteria. Since they’ve been documented as detaining citizens, lying about things like asylum claims or criminal status, etc. in many cases, their word alone is now untrustworthy for any case. They chose to create that distrust and the only way to build trust is for them to stop prioritizing quotas over legality.
What’s happening now is exactly what happens every time some incompetent boss tells everyone to hit a number no matter what, except that the stakes are far higher.