Need A Shocker Today ?: Illegals Don’t Have US Citizen Rights!?

Question

Yes it takes a minute to read so do not whine.LONG ISLAND officials protested when federal agents searching for immigrant gang members raided local homes two weeks ago. The agents had rousted American citizens and legal immigrants from their beds in the night, complained Lawrence W. Mulvey, the Nassau County police commissioner, and arrested suspected illegal immigrants without so much as a warrant.

“We don’t need warrants to make the arrests,” responded Peter J. Smith, the special agent in charge in New York for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the agency that conducted the raids.

His concise answer helps explain the friction that the Bush administration’s recent campaign of immigration enforcement has caused. Last week, immigration officials announced that they had made more than 1,300 arrests across the country over the summer when they went looking for gang members. Since the raids were carried out under immigration law, many protections in place under the American criminal codes did not apply. Foreign residents of the United States, whether here legally or not, answer to a different set of rules.

Immigration agents are not required to obtain warrants to detain suspects. The agents also have broad authority to question people about their immigration status and to search them and their homes. There are no Miranda rights that agents must read when making arrests. Detained immigrants have the right to a lawyer, but only one they can pay for.

While criminal suspects are generally sent to jails near the courts that hear their cases, immigration agents have discretion in deciding where to hold immigrants detained for deportation. Many suspected illegal immigrants who were detained in Nassau County, for example, were quickly moved to York, Pa., distant from family and legal advice.

This parallel course for noncitizens is not new. But it has come into fuller view as the enforcement drive has swept up record numbers of illegal immigrants, also reaching legal immigrants and citizens. In answer, a barrage of lawsuits is challenging both the laws and their enforcers…

Immigration law remains founded on the notion that immigrants are not full members of American society until they become citizens, writes Professor Kanstroom, who is also a practicing immigration lawyer. The reduced protections in modern-day law were shaped by some of the darker episodes of the 20th century, he writes, including the prosecution of immigrant dissidents, like the Australian union leader Harry Bridges, in the 1930s; and the mass roundups of Mexican workers in the 1950s.

Arising from that landscape, the courts that handle immigration cases are part of the Justice Department, not the judiciary. Even immigrants who have lived here legally for many years, lawyers said, can run afoul of the immigration laws with minor infractions or misdemeanors. A late filing of visa renewal papers or a shoplifting citation can quickly spiral into an order for the ultimate penalty: deportation. Immigrants who fight the orders have more limited bail rights than American criminals and can spend years behind bars while their cases inch through the overburdened court system…

There are sharp differences among legal experts and law enforcement officials about the limited protections in the immigration laws, many of which have been upheld over the years by the Supreme Court. Officials point out that the majority of the people deported last year entered the country illegally or plainly had lost any claim to legal status, including thousands of convicts.

“Immigration law enforcement is all about getting you to where you belong, which is outside the United States,” said Jan C. Ting, a law professor at Temple University who is a former assistant commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the precursor to ICE. He pointed out that immigration laws are civil codes, not criminal. “A lot of constitutional protections that one would normally expect in a criminal case do not necessarily apply,” he said.

Professor Ting says ICE agents are well within their authority to question people they come across in the course of a raid, even if they are not its targets, and detain them as suspects.

But new legal challenges are seeking to restrain ICE’s powers. A lawsuit in Tennessee challenges raids where agents teamed up with a county sheriff to search trailer parks, forcing their way without warrants into Hispanic immigrants’ homes. In a suit against ICE in Texas, seven citizens and legal immigrants contend their rights were violated in raids last year at Swift & Company meatpacking plants…

The basic laws of our country seem to have come as a nasty shock to the legal scholars at the New York Times.


Immigration law remains founded on the notion that immigrants are not full members of American society until they become citizens…

What an outrage.


The reduced protections in modern-day law were shaped by some of the darker episodes of the 20th century, he writes, including the prosecution of immigrant dissidents, like the Australian union leader Harry Bridges, in the 1930s; and the mass roundups of Mexican workers in the 1950s.

Would that be Harry Bridges the Communist rabble rouser who was prosecuted by successive Presidents FDR, Truman and Eisenhower for his non-stop union thuggery?

And would that horrific ”mass roundup of Mexican workers” be the completely lawful and highly effective “Operation *******,” which deported approximately 80,000 Mexican nationals in less than a year? And which convinced another 500,000 - 700,000 illegal aliens to go home?

Ah, those were “darker episodes” indeed. We certainly can’t anyone enforcing our nation’s laws, can we?

But hopes springs eternal in the breast of the “paper of treason.”

With the NYT’s championing, the ALCU and other taxpayer supported 501c3 charities will soon be able to sue away all of those hidebound, pettifogging distinctions like “citizen” or “taxpayer.”

After all, there are votes to be harvested for their DNC masters. And to hell with everything else.

Answer 1

Hip Hip HOORAY for ICE and it's daring accomplishments in an attempt to enforce the immigration laws already on the books!

Until the ACLU starts calling itself the Illegal Civil Liberties Union, I guess they better start supporting AMERICAN CITIZENS first, since we're the ones who's rights are being taken away.

Illegal immigrants, by the virtue of their very existance makes whatever they say or do--WRONG.

Answer 2

I sislike illegal immigration, but let's look into what immigratiion is really doing. Watch born in East LA. It's funny unless it happens to you. It;s fine to say immigrants have less rights, but immigration can do the same nasty tricks to a citizen. If there is no process in place to make sure Citizens aren't treated this way, then basically all of us has lost our rights. Federal agents can break into a house with out warrants and claim we were hiding illegal immigrants.

Answer 3

Lets see, when illegals break our laws from entering without permission, using stolen or fraudulently SSN, not pay their taxes, use our hospitals to have their anchor babies, knowing farewell that do not have the means or the will to pay their bills, over crowd our schools with their children that need mostly Spanish speaking teachers, that's their due. But when our law enforce agencies try a enforce our laws dealing with the illegals, we are told that we are being not only unfair, but brutal as well, but we are the guilty ones. Maybe the illegals and their supporters want a welcome center where the illegals can check in get all their needs met, at the tax payers expense of course, god knows we don't want to hold them responsible for their behavior

Answer 4

Mexico doesn’t mind if Americans cross their borders at will. Canadians do.

Looks to me like Americans are becoming like second class citizens and should side with the Mexicans.

Answer 5

During the early years of the US colonies there were laws that only applied to some groups - only protected the rights of protestants, for example. Later in our history killing Chinamen here in Arizona was something of a misdemeanor.

It is critical that all laws & rights are afforded to EVERYONE within the jurisdiction, regardless whether they are US-born citizen, naturalised citizen, legal alien, illegal alien, tourist, refugee or whatever.

The Nazis were just one group who thought it was OK to persecute people, if they didn't like them - we can't afford to "think" the same way.

Of course, this in no way suggests that illegal aliens be allowed to stay in the USA, once they have been identified - perhaps we might ask the Office of the President to do his bloody job for once.

Answer 6

Okay, I guess your question was "can we?".

And my answer is "Well, the system we have for handling illegal aliens is not working now, and I don't see a real good plan for the future handling of illegal aliens, but, I surely don't think we should."

Answer 7

Sorry....but there has to be a pay off for being a citizen....or why else bother.?

Citizen trumps illegal.
Wife trumps mistress.
Good trumps bad.....or why bother?

Seriously.....why abide by rules or standards if it doesn;t pay off? We are back to who carries the big stick wins.....
If that is the way it takes to win.....fine...I know the rules......what bothers us....is don't change the rules if we can't play by those same rules,

Answer 8

The same bla,bla,bla again. Please remember inmigration is not invasion., wich is what's happening now. and the problem of Illegal inmigration is that little word. "illegal" in spanish is "ilegal" o sea en contra de la ley. = against the law, is this too difficult to understand ?????????????

Answer 9

More roundups! More deportations! Less illegals! This all sounds good to me.

Answer 10

That's not entirely true. I cases where an illegal alien is arrested for a criminal offense (non immigration related) they still have the right to a fair trial and legal representation.

BTW, next time please be more concise. And that last line is just nonsense.