Enforcing the law. That’s what some people in the U.S. — a minority — are saying about ICE and Border Patrol. After all, the people they’re taking away are here illegally, right?
In actual fact, every time they barge into a house or smash a car window and grab someone, they are breaking the law. Up to now, the highest law of the land has been the U.S. Constitution. And there is, as a Texas judge wrote in his decision to free a 5-year-old boy they were deporting, “that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment.” It says you can’t enter a house (or now a car) without a warrant — from a judge. Not from ICE itself: that would be, as the judge wrote, “the fox guarding the henhouse.”
And then there’s the Fourteenth Amendment: “… [no State] shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Note: It doesn’t say “any citizen,” it says “any person” cannot be deprived of liberty “without due process of law.” That means, at a minimum, appearing before a judge. Every time ICE grabs someone, throws her or him into a van and speeds away to a waiting plane or detention center, they are breaking the law. Not enforcing it.
They are not “arresting” people, they are kidnapping them: arrests in a democracy are followed by an appearance in court. This is the oldest right we have. It’s called habeas corpus (“you should have the body”) and goes back to the English Magna Carta of 1215. ICE is not a law enforcement agency. It is a lawless bunch of thugs.
“But they’re illegal!” some say. So is the guy who steals a car, but police don’t just grab him and send him to prison somewhere. There’s a trial, where people have a chance to defend themselves, whatever they’re accused of. When the people of Minneapolis organize to document and resist that army of masked, heavily armed men occupying their city, they’re the ones trying to uphold the law.
If ICE comes here, I hope we will bind together, help our neighbors, and resist.
David Ball
Northampton