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Every time I read something hysterical on this forum I always flip what is being talked about in my head:
Less tongue-in-cheek, it seems like the firebrands on the topic of immigration on the US are pretty much cheering for the suspension of habeus corpus: deport by any means necessary, due process be damned. It's unfortunate that it's gotten to this point. But I also dread the unintended consequences / friendly-fire. I guess at least if you're on the conservative side of the political spectrum you don't have any fears of political persecution under this administration.
The most fundamental authority of a sovereign entity is determining who is permitted within its borders. The US government has, fundamentally, unconditional authority to expel a foreigner.
There's this argument I once came across in a book on Christian apologetics. The book isn't interesting enough to name, but I remember one argument it made. The book largely endorsed the standard view of cosmology while attempting to complement its position with various applications of the teleological argument. One was based on Earth's magnetic field. The argument goes, the field has a measurable rate of decay, so if we look back, at some point in natural history we would find a period when the field would be as strong as that of a neutron star.
I see this, the "neutron star fallacy" everywhere. Racism, sexism, religious bigotry. If we were so racist, so sexist, so bigoted, if we were so tyrannical for so many, then how were we ever liberated? And yet I know slopes are slippery. It's our world, when "indulgent" behaviors of any variety are made easier, we slide right into them, and we keep sliding. When the federal bureaucracy had its small departments with narrow scopes, soon enough they became massive departments with broad scopes. But there was a point when we could deport foreigners with minimal hurdle, and now we can't.
The power hasn't been reduced, it's been redistributed. The judge exercises greater authority than the President, and where the judge is seen as a check, who checks the judge? A structure by all impressions designed to eliminate such methods of account, for the requirements of censure and removal. It is the system turning a tyranny upon itself, because the judge involved here didn't order the deported's return because they care so much about the law, they ordered it because they hate so much the man behind the deportations.
"It's a slippery slope to mass deportations of undesirable citizens." That never happened here. "They're due habeus corpus" no, not for expulsion.
Slopes are slippery, yeah, but if you're like me (up until this moment) you might visualize the slope as starting at the left and falling to the right. I feel the last century can be neatly explained by visualizing it as starting at the right and falling to the left.
How do you know the judge's motivations? And isn't this begging the question of how the Executive being check-free would be better? Do you also dislike checks and balances, when you disagree with Executive policy?
The WH Press Secretary says they're looking into the legality of deporting undesirable citizens. Have a legal citation for expulsion being an exception to habeas corpus?
The nicer interpretation is they hate Trump. The thoroughly evidence interpretation is they hate the US and are actively working to destroy it.
I've had a problem with the operations of the judicial branch since well before Trump. I oppose any judge below SCOTUS issuing any federal injunction for any reason. The essential structure of the sovereign United States is Executive, Congress, SCOTUS. Executive appointments have no authority to check SCOTUS, it follows circuit courts have no authority to check POTUS.
Sovereigns owe foreigners no rights. A foreigner has no claim to habeas corpus, let alone any appeal for their deportation, as sovereigns may unconditionally expel foreigners. Citizens are owed due process, which is fulfilled in trial and verdict. I agree that a state should not be able to remove citizens who are otherwise-non-criminally-undesirable, but the conflation of deporting foreigners or banishing violent criminals with latter tyranny is historically baseless and at best maudlin idealism and at worst fearmongering weaponized in service of preserving the tremendous numbers of illegal aliens in this country.
The UK practiced transportation for centuries, now they won't deport serial rapists.
If a foreigner has no claim to habeas corpus, how should claims of citizenship by individuals/non-citizenship by the state be adjudicated?
Ideally:
Alternatively:
In practice, any individual who fails to produce such documentation is a foreigner and present illegally (note: foreigners are legally required to carry ID). As foreigners may be expelled unconditionally, the court has no jurisdiction over the sovereign exercise of the right of deportation, and so foreigners have no legitimate claim to habeas corpus specifically in the matter of their deportation. That "precedent" says they do, and that we do in practice afford them habeas corpus, does not make it legitimate. The sovereign right of deportation is a first principle authority, it cannot be legitimately reduced or abrogated. That is, a state may, without qualification, always and in all cases legitimately remove foreigners from its borders.
Do you have a citation for this? I want to be make sure I understand which of your statements are factual and which are policy preferences.
Can this crime be punished without trial?
In your "ideal" adjudication, what prevents ICE from deporting citizens in bad faith and/or due to its demonstrated incompetence? (Even if you think the risk is low, the hazard must be addressed.)
Which precedent and why should we question its legitimacy?
The citation is pure reason.
Definitions:
Premises:
Conclusion:
A sovereign's supreme control of territory grants a priori authority for the unconditional expulsion of foreigners:
(A) ∧ (B) ∧ (C) ∧ (D) ∧ (E) ∧ (G) ∧ (H)
I disagree. The leftist establishment uses such fringe cases to demand individual full trials for every deportation while they work ardently to increase the number of illegal aliens in this country. As with those states' issuance of IDs to illegals, the point is not the sanctity of the law or interest in a better-functioning state. The interest is in making it impossible to remove the tens of millions of illegal aliens in this country.
In practice those who cannot provide documentation are here illegally. The remaining edge cases of even several hundred homeless or otherwise profoundly socially detached citizens accidentally deported by ICE do not justify the requirement of millions of trials. But that's another excellent example, as if the homeless were institutionalized as they ought to be, there would be no concern, and then it would be well and truly an extreme minority of citizens who could not prove their citizenship. Regardless, it is not in the interest of a functional state to delay (and, given the above, ultimately fail) at the needed millions of deportations because once in a blue moon a homeless person or Kaczynski-ite is accidentally included. And of course, this would never have been a problem if politicians and billionaires didn't open the doors to millions of illegals in service of gaining future voters and cheap labor. They're causing the problem, they don't get a say in its solution.
See top. Border control is a priori to courts, habeas corpus requires court jurisdiction, courts have no jurisdiction in matters of border control. Again, they literally do, but from fundamental theory of sovereignty, they do not, and thus all actions taken by courts to limit the sovereign exercise of border control are inherently illegitimate.
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I don't necessarily disagree with this. I was literally just mocking ("tongue-in-cheek") the hyperbole of the OP that was brought forth without much forethought: reactionary doomposting.
The world has changed significantly. People used to show up on our shores with nothing more than a name on a ship manifest. Now passports with electronic components are ubiquitous and traveling without one is unimaginable. Bureaucracy must exist to manage this, no? Or do we simply turn away all foreigners based on a "vibe check" from the current executive? Bureaucracy shouldn't be judged by its size, but by its outcomes (I'll touch on that later in this comment).
This feels like a non-sequitur so I'm just going to ignore it after quoting it...
What days are you hearkening back to? I struggle to think of any notable mass deportations in the modern era. Japanese Internment Camps with FDR? Trail of Tears with Andrew Jackson? Or even further, when you were simply accepted into or rejected from based on skin tone and accent?
The legislature, which originally ceded its power for short-term political gains (thanks Newt Gingrich), but has now ceded its power for reactionary political revolution (thanks Mike Johnson).
I'm not defending the current asylum system, as the impression that it can be abused has brought us to a less-than-optimal political "middle-ground" where a few hundred judges are assigned to hundreds of thousands of cases to determine whether someone's asylum claim is authentic or not. Conservatives are on record opposing legislative immigration reform for more than a decade. Progressives do not have political power at the federal level, even if you can find soundbytes on YouTube of them getting "owned". The neoliberal Democrat centrists have never been opposed to immigration reform, and have brought forth multiple bills delivering exactly what their conservative counterparts have asked for (thanks again Newt Gingrich, who needs bipartisan legislation when we can just swing a massive pendulum between 2 shitty alternatives every couple of years).
To go even further: I do think there are going to be really difficult pills to swallow in the coming decades regarding mass migration, not even outside of borders, but within our borders as well. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there is some potential future where we will be watching masses of people starve through binoculars across the Rio Grande. It'd be great to figure out how we can, as a nation, navigate those turbulent waters without regressing to animalistic authoritarianism, but over the past 10 years I have lost faith more and more that that's even possible.
All of this is just a play for more executive power. I don't trust that executive power won't be abused, especially given that the current executive seems to get off (sexually?) on flaunting abuses of power. But maybe there's where you and I differ in concerns about real dangers to our freedom in the coming years.
Good comment.
I invoke my "neutron star fallacy" at your reframing of the top-level comment. It's not a human rights abuse to send foreigners back to their home countries, even if they may face punishment or death. The argument goes that such "abuses" will inevitably snowball into greater tyranny but we know this never happened. It is directly analogous to the identitarian concerns I name.
Operation Wetback.
Voted removals aren't checks. A judge overrules the executive or congress, congress can vote to remove, while it takes another judge to overrule the first. The judicial checks itself. At a minimum it should be that if a judge is overruled by a superior court X instances in period of time Y, they are automatically and immediately removed from office. This maintains protection from a nearly-even congress politicizing removals (and the reciprocal gaming that would invite in a change of control) while making their accountability structural. But this also is not a check. We can remove judges ,stuff courts, the power remains, what do we do? Limit it as much as possible. The judicial effectually has authority that supersedes all others, so its authority must be the most strictly regulated, starting with all judges below SCOTUS losing the power to issue injunctions on government activity.
From 1900, every single bloodthirsty non-socialist non-communist nationalist movement emerged as a response to no less than equally bloodthirsty socialist and communist movements. No milquetoast conservative government sat by only to be taken over by reactionaries. So while I am also concerned about what horrors may lie in our future, I know they will only rise as the last reaction. My beliefs align with preventing that from happening by bringing about the people's current, eminently moderate requests. The district judge ordering the executive to bring back an illegal alien does not reduce the possibility of tyranny, it sharply raises it. Because again, the judicial branch checks itself, but these judges invite a check on power from a much different, far older structure.
Thanks for the link and jogging my memory, because I am loosely familiar with this and very familiar with Harlon Carter (amazing how history rhymes so much: parallels to be drawn between modern figures and historical figures).
My takeaway from (admittedly, briefly) reading about this operation is that the "success" wasn't strictly that the executive was able to act with impunity absent judicial oversight, but also that the Mexican government was equally enthusiastic about stemming the tide of migrants.
I still hold the position that the legislature is where the solutions to immigration should lie, and that any interaction between the executive and judicial is fundamentally suspect. I appreciate your comment, but I'm not certain that I can be convinced otherwise.
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This is an an exercise of US sovereignty and its authority, as manifest by the above.
The craziest thing is that not a single person upset about this has proposed that Congress just repeal or limit 241(b)(3) and say that everyone that got withholding of removal under it expires in 3 months.
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