—> ICE / Immigration / Nation grapples with ICE killings

[uncgriff]

As to the deported,

'And some, I assume, are bad people'

 

[TangledUpInBlue06]

MdDoogie3 (@mddoogie3.bsky.social)

This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.

bsky.app

Unrolled thread here:

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”​

​

A month ago, I knew almost zero about immigration law. I hadn’t dealt with it since clerking >10 years ago. I had no interest in immigration law. I knew even before law school I didn’t want to go into criminal law. I didn’t want power or responsibility over someone’s freedom or their life.​

​

The same rationale applied to immigration law. Immigration outcomes are life and death. People can be uprooted from the life they built (for some who arrive as children, the only life they know). They can be sent back to deadly situations in countries they fled fearing for their life. (And let me note that immigration law FAVORS such horrific outcomes. Asylum is very hard to win. Immigration “court” isn’t a real court. It’s a kangaroo court where DHS is judge, jury, and executioner. You have no right to counsel. And the law tilts against non-citizens all conceivable ways.)​

​

15 years ago when I went to law school, 12 years ago when I began practicing… hell, a month ago, I wanted nothing to do with immigration law.​

​

On January 14, however, what I wanted stopped mattering.​

​

I work for a Minneapolis-based firm. MPLS was and is under attack by the federal government. Hundreds of people are being snatched off the streets. Undocumented immigrants, DACA recipients, asylees, asylum seekers, refugees, lawful permanent residents, citizens. Legal status doesn’t matter: if you exceed ICE’s melanin threshold, you get snatched. It is ethnic cleansing. There is no other word for it.​

​

The news has shown you video of these often violent detentions. What you don’t see is what happens to these individuals after.​

​

I’ve had a front row seat.​

​

Local immigrant defense networks were deluged with life and death cases. They put a call out for private lawyers to step in and provide pro bono help. My firm did. And since we joined the effort on January 14, it’s been some of the hardest, most exhausting, most depressing month of my life.​

​

Judges have mostly rejected the government’s attempt to detain anyone who is black or brown. As of early January (the last time anyone had time to count) 300 judges in 1000s of decisions rejected the government’s arguments. Less than a dozen permit it. That’s for a really simple, really good reason. To justify detaining noncitizens indefinitely and without due process, the Trump regime has adopted a tortured reading of immigration laws.​

​

See, there is a law that provides for mandatory detention of “arriving aliens.” Trump’s DHS says everyone who is not a citizen or LPR is “arriving”… even if they arrived two or three decades ago. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that makes no sense. But lawyers interpret statutes according to a hierarchy of agreed-upon “canons of construction.”​

​

The first is that a statute’s plain language controls. The regime’s interpretation violates that canon. So it is legally invalid. It violates other canons too. The government’s reading renders an entire act of Congress—the GOP-championed Laken Riley Act—superfluous. So it violates the canon against superfluity. It violates the ejusdem canon, which says similar language in similar statutes has the same meaning. And the canon that instructs us to draw understanding of a statute’s meaning from its title. The list goes on.​

​

The government’s argument for why it is entitled to strip residents of their due process rights and lock them away indefinitely is easily the most frivolous argument I’ve ever seen. Yet asst. U.S. attorneys—AUSA used to be an esteemed title—continue to make this frivolous argument over and over in bald-faced arguments in case after case. They’ve been told no many thousands of times. They admit (remarkably) in their filings that they know their arguments are meritless.​

​

Meanwhile, DHS shows its contempt for the judiciary in a different way. In dozens, likely now thousands, of cases, DHS openly defies court orders. Minnesota courts enter orders forbidding ICE from moving noncitizens who’ve filed habeas petitions out of Minnesota. They move them anyway.​

​

See ICE wants these cases in Texas, where Trump-infected courts are more tolerant of their antics, more biased against non-citizens, more willing to let DHS fill up concentration camps. (Not all Texas judges, for sure. Plenty are bravely faithful to the rule of law. ICE is playing the numbers)​

​

So it’s a race: how quickly can a person’s family realize they were snatched and find a lawyer, and how quickly can that lawyer get a habeas petition of file? And is that faster than ICE can load the detainee on a plane to Texas?​

​

It’s exhausting and terrifying. It can be life and death.​

​

And even when we move at warp speed and outpace this regime, DHS doesn’t care. They’ve moved people to Texas hours or days after being enjoined. When ordered to return them, DHS just… doesn’t. The AUSAs let them: when we notify them of a violation, they send the email equivalent of a shrug.​

​

I had two clients moved within an hour of ICE learning we were looking for them and advising us there was not plan to move them. A family of four moved 36 hours after a court order forbidding them from being moved. 3 other clients moved within a day of court-ordered injunctions.​

​

And what awaits these clients in Texas? Unspeakably cruel and inhumane treatment.​

​

1. Rotten food. I had a client explain she had to make a half-pint of milk and an apple last every day because the other meals consisted of spoiled or rotten food. One client wasn’t fed for >36 hours.​

​

2. Non-potable water. Clients have reported becoming ill from chemical-tasting water. Some developed rashes.​

​

3. Deplorable accommodations. A client sick with the flu was forced to sleep on a frigid concrete floor. In Camp East Montana, fetid water leaches through the roof and soaks the beds.​

​

4. Medical malpractice. Here’s why I say stopping this detention-to Texas pipeline is life of death. An 18-month old hospitalized after nearly dying of three simultaneous respiratory infections. When she returned to the camp, DHS withheld her meds. A transplant recipient whose body was rejecting his organ because DHS won’t give him his absolutely essential anti-rejection meds. I had a pregnant client who was experiencing abdominal cramping for three days and was deprived of medical care. When we interceded, she was punished. A first grader snatched two days after surgery denied wound care. A client who developed a large painful cyst but was ignored.​

​

These are the conditions under which the Trump regime wants to detain noncitizens indefinitely. It violates international law, the Eighth Amendment, and our own laws & regulations. And the DOJ and DHS are willing to manipulate any law, defy any court order, to keep doing so.​

​

People can have different political opinions about immigration policy. Political differences are fine, healthy for a democracy. But if you’re okay with this, that’s not a political opinion. That is a moral failing.​

​

Like I said when I started, I don’t know what to expect from posting this here. Maybe in hopes it galvanizes 1 of my ~5 followers. But at the very least, thank you if you read all the way through. We must not look away.​

​

So the confrontations, violent apprehensions, and general fear bearing down on communities like Minnesota is only the beginning of the nightmare. Behind the scenes, Orwellian anti-judicial antics thwart lawful recourse. And hidden from sight, non-citizens are tortured for being noncitizens.​

​

And please thank lawyers doing this work. We’re carrying a lot of trauma for voiceless clients. We are tired. We have become experts in new law under the most dire circumstances.​

​

If you can, donate to immigration defense funds. They’ve been at it the longest and have the least resources. To everyone thanking me, much appreciated but not why I posted! Pls support your local immigrant defense group like:​

​

The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota: www.ilcm.org/donate/​

Or my hometown LUCE: www.lucemass.org/donate​

Or Google your city/state & “immigrant defense” to find your local heroes!​

 

[superrific]

Of course they're useful. No one should suggest otherwise. Statisticians run in my family. My mother's aunt was Gertrude Cox. Look her up.
The problem is when they're used out of context to support an argument. It's important to look into the basis for the stat rather than assuming it proves a point.

Of course that's true. I just think the saying sweeps far too broadly -- but really it was more a flippant comment.

 

[superrific]

MdDoogie3 (@mddoogie3.bsky.social)

This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.

bsky.app

Unrolled thread here:

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”​

​

A month ago, I knew almost zero about immigration law. I hadn’t dealt with it since clerking >10 years ago. I had no interest in immigration law. I knew even before law school I didn’t want to go into criminal law. I didn’t want power or responsibility over someone’s freedom or their life.​

​

The same rationale applied to immigration law. Immigration outcomes are life and death. People can be uprooted from the life they built (for some who arrive as children, the only life they know). They can be sent back to deadly situations in countries they fled fearing for their life. (And let me note that immigration law FAVORS such horrific outcomes. Asylum is very hard to win. Immigration “court” isn’t a real court. It’s a kangaroo court where DHS is judge, jury, and executioner. You have no right to counsel. And the law tilts against non-citizens all conceivable ways.)​

​

15 years ago when I went to law school, 12 years ago when I began practicing… hell, a month ago, I wanted nothing to do with immigration law.​

​

On January 14, however, what I wanted stopped mattering.​

​

I work for a Minneapolis-based firm. MPLS was and is under attack by the federal government. Hundreds of people are being snatched off the streets. Undocumented immigrants, DACA recipients, asylees, asylum seekers, refugees, lawful permanent residents, citizens. Legal status doesn’t matter: if you exceed ICE’s melanin threshold, you get snatched. It is ethnic cleansing. There is no other word for it.​

​

The news has shown you video of these often violent detentions. What you don’t see is what happens to these individuals after.​

​

I’ve had a front row seat.​

​

Local immigrant defense networks were deluged with life and death cases. They put a call out for private lawyers to step in and provide pro bono help. My firm did. And since we joined the effort on January 14, it’s been some of the hardest, most exhausting, most depressing month of my life.​

​

Judges have mostly rejected the government’s attempt to detain anyone who is black or brown. As of early January (the last time anyone had time to count) 300 judges in 1000s of decisions rejected the government’s arguments. Less than a dozen permit it. That’s for a really simple, really good reason. To justify detaining noncitizens indefinitely and without due process, the Trump regime has adopted a tortured reading of immigration laws.​

​

See, there is a law that provides for mandatory detention of “arriving aliens.” Trump’s DHS says everyone who is not a citizen or LPR is “arriving”… even if they arrived two or three decades ago. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that makes no sense. But lawyers interpret statutes according to a hierarchy of agreed-upon “canons of construction.”​

​

The first is that a statute’s plain language controls. The regime’s interpretation violates that canon. So it is legally invalid. It violates other canons too. The government’s reading renders an entire act of Congress—the GOP-championed Laken Riley Act—superfluous. So it violates the canon against superfluity. It violates the ejusdem canon, which says similar language in similar statutes has the same meaning. And the canon that instructs us to draw understanding of a statute’s meaning from its title. The list goes on.​

​

The government’s argument for why it is entitled to strip residents of their due process rights and lock them away indefinitely is easily the most frivolous argument I’ve ever seen. Yet asst. U.S. attorneys—AUSA used to be an esteemed title—continue to make this frivolous argument over and over in bald-faced arguments in case after case. They’ve been told no many thousands of times. They admit (remarkably) in their filings that they know their arguments are meritless.​

​

Meanwhile, DHS shows its contempt for the judiciary in a different way. In dozens, likely now thousands, of cases, DHS openly defies court orders. Minnesota courts enter orders forbidding ICE from moving noncitizens who’ve filed habeas petitions out of Minnesota. They move them anyway.​

​

See ICE wants these cases in Texas, where Trump-infected courts are more tolerant of their antics, more biased against non-citizens, more willing to let DHS fill up concentration camps. (Not all Texas judges, for sure. Plenty are bravely faithful to the rule of law. ICE is playing the numbers)​

​

So it’s a race: how quickly can a person’s family realize they were snatched and find a lawyer, and how quickly can that lawyer get a habeas petition of file? And is that faster than ICE can load the detainee on a plane to Texas?​

​

It’s exhausting and terrifying. It can be life and death.​

​

And even when we move at warp speed and outpace this regime, DHS doesn’t care. They’ve moved people to Texas hours or days after being enjoined. When ordered to return them, DHS just… doesn’t. The AUSAs let them: when we notify them of a violation, they send the email equivalent of a shrug.​

​

I had two clients moved within an hour of ICE learning we were looking for them and advising us there was not plan to move them. A family of four moved 36 hours after a court order forbidding them from being moved. 3 other clients moved within a day of court-ordered injunctions.​

​

And what awaits these clients in Texas? Unspeakably cruel and inhumane treatment.​

​

1. Rotten food. I had a client explain she had to make a half-pint of milk and an apple last every day because the other meals consisted of spoiled or rotten food. One client wasn’t fed for >36 hours.​

​

2. Non-potable water. Clients have reported becoming ill from chemical-tasting water. Some developed rashes.​

​

3. Deplorable accommodations. A client sick with the flu was forced to sleep on a frigid concrete floor. In Camp East Montana, fetid water leaches through the roof and soaks the beds.​

​

4. Medical malpractice. Here’s why I say stopping this detention-to Texas pipeline is life of death. An 18-month old hospitalized after nearly dying of three simultaneous respiratory infections. When she returned to the camp, DHS withheld her meds. A transplant recipient whose body was rejecting his organ because DHS won’t give him his absolutely essential anti-rejection meds. I had a pregnant client who was experiencing abdominal cramping for three days and was deprived of medical care. When we interceded, she was punished. A first grader snatched two days after surgery denied wound care. A client who developed a large painful cyst but was ignored.​

​

These are the conditions under which the Trump regime wants to detain noncitizens indefinitely. It violates international law, the Eighth Amendment, and our own laws & regulations. And the DOJ and DHS are willing to manipulate any law, defy any court order, to keep doing so.​

​

People can have different political opinions about immigration policy. Political differences are fine, healthy for a democracy. But if you’re okay with this, that’s not a political opinion. That is a moral failing.​

​

Like I said when I started, I don’t know what to expect from posting this here. Maybe in hopes it galvanizes 1 of my ~5 followers. But at the very least, thank you if you read all the way through. We must not look away.​

​

So the confrontations, violent apprehensions, and general fear bearing down on communities like Minnesota is only the beginning of the nightmare. Behind the scenes, Orwellian anti-judicial antics thwart lawful recourse. And hidden from sight, non-citizens are tortured for being noncitizens.​

​

And please thank lawyers doing this work. We’re carrying a lot of trauma for voiceless clients. We are tired. We have become experts in new law under the most dire circumstances.​

​

If you can, donate to immigration defense funds. They’ve been at it the longest and have the least resources. To everyone thanking me, much appreciated but not why I posted! Pls support your local immigrant defense group like:​

​

The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota: www.ilcm.org/donate/​

Or my hometown LUCE: www.lucemass.org/donate​

Or Google your city/state & “immigrant defense” to find your local heroes!​

Thank you for posting this.

I remember predicting that Trump was going to open concentration camps and being told by conservatives that I was hyperventilating.

I was right. Liberals in general were right. There are concentration camps now. And the only response from conservatives is "stop exercising your right to free speech by comparing us to Nazis, or else we'll blow your head off." Which is not quite the counterargument they think it is.

 

[CarolinaFever]

Of course they're useful. No one should suggest otherwise. Statisticians run in my family. My mother's aunt was Gertrude Cox. Look her up.
The problem is when they're used out of context to support an argument. It's important to look into the basis for the stat rather than assuming it proves a point.

That's cool. I have been in her building a few times.

 

[CarolinaFever]

MdDoogie3 (@mddoogie3.bsky.social)

This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.

bsky.app

Unrolled thread here:

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”​

​

A month ago, I knew almost zero about immigration law. I hadn’t dealt with it since clerking >10 years ago. I had no interest in immigration law. I knew even before law school I didn’t want to go into criminal law. I didn’t want power or responsibility over someone’s freedom or their life.​

​

The same rationale applied to immigration law. Immigration outcomes are life and death. People can be uprooted from the life they built (for some who arrive as children, the only life they know). They can be sent back to deadly situations in countries they fled fearing for their life. (And let me note that immigration law FAVORS such horrific outcomes. Asylum is very hard to win. Immigration “court” isn’t a real court. It’s a kangaroo court where DHS is judge, jury, and executioner. You have no right to counsel. And the law tilts against non-citizens all conceivable ways.)​

​

15 years ago when I went to law school, 12 years ago when I began practicing… hell, a month ago, I wanted nothing to do with immigration law.​

​

On January 14, however, what I wanted stopped mattering.​

​

I work for a Minneapolis-based firm. MPLS was and is under attack by the federal government. Hundreds of people are being snatched off the streets. Undocumented immigrants, DACA recipients, asylees, asylum seekers, refugees, lawful permanent residents, citizens. Legal status doesn’t matter: if you exceed ICE’s melanin threshold, you get snatched. It is ethnic cleansing. There is no other word for it.​

​

The news has shown you video of these often violent detentions. What you don’t see is what happens to these individuals after.​

​

I’ve had a front row seat.​

​

Local immigrant defense networks were deluged with life and death cases. They put a call out for private lawyers to step in and provide pro bono help. My firm did. And since we joined the effort on January 14, it’s been some of the hardest, most exhausting, most depressing month of my life.​

​

Judges have mostly rejected the government’s attempt to detain anyone who is black or brown. As of early January (the last time anyone had time to count) 300 judges in 1000s of decisions rejected the government’s arguments. Less than a dozen permit it. That’s for a really simple, really good reason. To justify detaining noncitizens indefinitely and without due process, the Trump regime has adopted a tortured reading of immigration laws.​

​

See, there is a law that provides for mandatory detention of “arriving aliens.” Trump’s DHS says everyone who is not a citizen or LPR is “arriving”… even if they arrived two or three decades ago. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that makes no sense. But lawyers interpret statutes according to a hierarchy of agreed-upon “canons of construction.”​

​

The first is that a statute’s plain language controls. The regime’s interpretation violates that canon. So it is legally invalid. It violates other canons too. The government’s reading renders an entire act of Congress—the GOP-championed Laken Riley Act—superfluous. So it violates the canon against superfluity. It violates the ejusdem canon, which says similar language in similar statutes has the same meaning. And the canon that instructs us to draw understanding of a statute’s meaning from its title. The list goes on.​

​

The government’s argument for why it is entitled to strip residents of their due process rights and lock them away indefinitely is easily the most frivolous argument I’ve ever seen. Yet asst. U.S. attorneys—AUSA used to be an esteemed title—continue to make this frivolous argument over and over in bald-faced arguments in case after case. They’ve been told no many thousands of times. They admit (remarkably) in their filings that they know their arguments are meritless.​

​

Meanwhile, DHS shows its contempt for the judiciary in a different way. In dozens, likely now thousands, of cases, DHS openly defies court orders. Minnesota courts enter orders forbidding ICE from moving noncitizens who’ve filed habeas petitions out of Minnesota. They move them anyway.​

​

See ICE wants these cases in Texas, where Trump-infected courts are more tolerant of their antics, more biased against non-citizens, more willing to let DHS fill up concentration camps. (Not all Texas judges, for sure. Plenty are bravely faithful to the rule of law. ICE is playing the numbers)​

​

So it’s a race: how quickly can a person’s family realize they were snatched and find a lawyer, and how quickly can that lawyer get a habeas petition of file? And is that faster than ICE can load the detainee on a plane to Texas?​

​

It’s exhausting and terrifying. It can be life and death.​

​

And even when we move at warp speed and outpace this regime, DHS doesn’t care. They’ve moved people to Texas hours or days after being enjoined. When ordered to return them, DHS just… doesn’t. The AUSAs let them: when we notify them of a violation, they send the email equivalent of a shrug.​

​

I had two clients moved within an hour of ICE learning we were looking for them and advising us there was not plan to move them. A family of four moved 36 hours after a court order forbidding them from being moved. 3 other clients moved within a day of court-ordered injunctions.​

​

And what awaits these clients in Texas? Unspeakably cruel and inhumane treatment.​

​

1. Rotten food. I had a client explain she had to make a half-pint of milk and an apple last every day because the other meals consisted of spoiled or rotten food. One client wasn’t fed for >36 hours.​

​

2. Non-potable water. Clients have reported becoming ill from chemical-tasting water. Some developed rashes.​

​

3. Deplorable accommodations. A client sick with the flu was forced to sleep on a frigid concrete floor. In Camp East Montana, fetid water leaches through the roof and soaks the beds.​

​

4. Medical malpractice. Here’s why I say stopping this detention-to Texas pipeline is life of death. An 18-month old hospitalized after nearly dying of three simultaneous respiratory infections. When she returned to the camp, DHS withheld her meds. A transplant recipient whose body was rejecting his organ because DHS won’t give him his absolutely essential anti-rejection meds. I had a pregnant client who was experiencing abdominal cramping for three days and was deprived of medical care. When we interceded, she was punished. A first grader snatched two days after surgery denied wound care. A client who developed a large painful cyst but was ignored.​

​

These are the conditions under which the Trump regime wants to detain noncitizens indefinitely. It violates international law, the Eighth Amendment, and our own laws & regulations. And the DOJ and DHS are willing to manipulate any law, defy any court order, to keep doing so.​

​

People can have different political opinions about immigration policy. Political differences are fine, healthy for a democracy. But if you’re okay with this, that’s not a political opinion. That is a moral failing.​

​

Like I said when I started, I don’t know what to expect from posting this here. Maybe in hopes it galvanizes 1 of my ~5 followers. But at the very least, thank you if you read all the way through. We must not look away.​

​

So the confrontations, violent apprehensions, and general fear bearing down on communities like Minnesota is only the beginning of the nightmare. Behind the scenes, Orwellian anti-judicial antics thwart lawful recourse. And hidden from sight, non-citizens are tortured for being noncitizens.​

​

And please thank lawyers doing this work. We’re carrying a lot of trauma for voiceless clients. We are tired. We have become experts in new law under the most dire circumstances.​

​

If you can, donate to immigration defense funds. They’ve been at it the longest and have the least resources. To everyone thanking me, much appreciated but not why I posted! Pls support your local immigrant defense group like:​

​

The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota: www.ilcm.org/donate/​

Or my hometown LUCE: www.lucemass.org/donate​

Or Google your city/state & “immigrant defense” to find your local heroes!​

This is just plain evil. Like the author said, it's not about politics. It is a moral failing. Everything with Trump has been a moral failing.

 

[finesse]

Amoral failings, actually.

 

[1moretimeagain]

Tom Homan said the Minneapolis surge is ending with a total number of immigrant arrests at 4,000.

3,000 agents there for more than 2 months, with all this noise and disruption and the total comes in at 1.3 immigrants removed per agent.

 

[finesse]

Tom Homan said the Minneapolis surge is ending with a total number of immigrant arrests at 4,000.

3,000 agents there for more than 2 months, with all this noise and disruption and the total comes in at 1.3 immigrants removed per agent.

They could have sent 200 professionals, had each tackle 10 cases a month for two months, get more done ,make more solid detention and arrest decisions, cost about a hundredth as much, never draw a protestor or make a headline. Fucking cosplay cabinet and Clown in Chief.