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Notes -
https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/04/17/u-s-born-man-held-for-ice-under-floridas-new-anti-immigration-law/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-born-citizen-detained-ice-immigration-florida-rcna201800
A Florida State Trooper claimed a natural born citizen admitted to entering the country illegally. Thankfully, his family was able to prove his citizenship to a state judge. Unfortunately, ICE requested Florida keep him in custody, for an as-yet not-public reason, and Florida has done so, despite the citizen not being charged with any state crime, other than an unenforceable statute against illegal immigrants entering Florida, of which he was already proven innocent, even if it were enforceable. He was later released, thankfully.
Any data on the rate of these sorts of things happening, in the past? Should or shouldn't this be worrying and why?
One of the problems with judges is that there is no accountability for legislating from the bench unless extremists are in power. Under moderates or even principled radicals, judges can be impeached for personal misconduct, but not for bad rulings that run contrary to the basic desires of most people. This inevitably drives radicalization.
For several decades, in both North America and Europe, judges have ruled on immigration cases in ways that fundamentally violate the popular will, and have unjustifiably prevented the deportation of people that most citizens did not and do not want to share their countries with. Unlike politicians, the people cannot really even try to remove judges, because while some are technically political appointees, the ‘profession’ has largely wrangled the ability to regulate itself away from legislatures in both spirit and practice.
The historical Anglo-Saxon judicial tradition upon which the Common Law is based always afforded judges the right, and indeed in many cases implicitly obligated them, to respect the people’s will. If a crowd of people clamor outside the courthouse for a man’s innocence or guilt, judges were and should be swayed by it. For millennia, and to the great detriment of the Jewish people, Christians blamed the Jews (the civilians) and not Pilate, who ultimately sentenced Christ, for his execution. Less (although sometimes not much less) controversially, there are countless cases in the English legal tradition in which judges heeded the popular call for a specific kind of justice.
I don’t want to live in an unaccountable dictatorship, in the Chinese legal system in which lawyers are either set dressing, fixers or enemies of the state or powerful officials with a very short career and freedom expectancy. But that is inevitable in the West unless judges use their verbal ability to sense the way the wind is blowing on immigration and start giving the people what they have so often and so politely requested.
Can you be more specific? In the USA, immigration courts handling individual cases are "administrative courts," within the Executive, so the judges can be changed with each administration. "Article III" Senate-confirmed, appointed-for-life judges rule on applicable statutory and constitutional questions.
The problem is not with these immigration “judges”, but with actual Article III judges like Boasberg or Xinis, who override the determinations of Article II examiners at will, making it effectively impossible to enforce law at scale. If every illegal gets Article III judiciary proceedings before finally getting removed, we will never be able to actually enforce the law. Imagine if military had to get a court decision before being able to kill an invading soldier.
What in the world are you talking about? In the Garcia case (that's in front of Xinis), it was the Article II examiner (in 2019, under Trump!) that signed the order withholding removal.
I really don't comprehend how you character this as overriding that determination. If anything, Boasberg is doing the polar opposite -- enforcing it.
Boasberg doesn’t have anything to do with Garcia
Ya mixed them up. Fixed.
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