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This is factually false. E-verify is a thing. If you want to stop people who are not authorized to work from working, then mandating that employers actually check that their employees are authorized to work for them seems like an obvious step to take.
If you haven't even taken the step of mandating the use of e-verify for all employers, I don't believe you when you say "but we have to disappear people, it's the only strategy that could possibly work".
Nobody is getting disappeared. Everyone apprehended can be looked up on a public website. https://locator.ice.gov/odls/#/search
Nobody, you say?
So ICE arrested someone, detained him for 37 days in the hospital under armed guard, did not charge him with anything, denied him legal counsel, and used a pseudonym when registering him in the locator. That sure sounds to me like "ICE disappeared that guy".
If he was in the hospital ICE would have gone to a judge and obtained a hospital order wherein they explained to the judge why he could not be brought to court for his initial court appearance. The judge then changed his/her mind after this situation continued for such a long time that he/she deemed it unreasonable given the state of the case. Your ignorance of criminal law has allowed you to be propagandized.
You wanna bring receipts on that for this case? I can bring them for the proceedings leading up to the TRO, and I see nothing like that mentioned.
Well all the documents appear to be sealed....
Where are you seeing the sealed documents? I see some paywalled ones that haven't yet been added to RECAP but nothing before Sep 30. Am I looking in the wrong place?
The rest of the case is on PACER, there are several unavailable documents that, most importantly, stake out ICE's position, as well as the order granting the TRO.
However, if I take the judge's written orders at face value I think the original article was not as misleading as I had anticipated.
Basically, I thought the article was describing the normal application of 18 USC 3142(d) (and analogous provisions in the immigration law, particularly 8 USC 1226) and the associated rules of criminal procedure (such as rule 43) where a detention-eligible defendant is physically unable to be brought to court, in this case because he is hospitalized.
Instead, what appears to have happened is a very odd plan by ICE. I don't know why they did what they did, whether it was just laziness, forgetfulness, pants on head level stupid, or an intentional ploy to generate a test case.
Again, in a normal case, you'd file charges or file for removal and then go to a judge and say, basically, "hey we know the statute says we have to release this guy in 10 days, or have a detention hearing. We can't have a detention hearing because he can't come to court because he's in the hospital." Then the judge sets it over a few days or weeks depending on the diagnosis and then you have the hearing once they can come to court. ICE did not do this. Why is the question, because there were entirely well worn legal ways to keep this fellow detained.
Arguments for laziness/forgetfulness: This case is in California. ICE in California is essentially blockaded within its own facilities. To actually fingerprint and process the defendant requires them to get him into the facility or a similar facility (which local municipalities won't let them use), and then he'd have to be taken back to the hospital. This is a lot of work for essentially finalizing what in their mind is a formality. Once he's fingerprinted they know they have the right guy, and by the way he's in the hospital so he's not "really" being detained in that he can't go somewhere he needs to be.
Arguments for pants on head: This appears to be pants on head stupid. They could just file the right paperwork for a removal proceeding and have mooted this entire habeas petition.
Arguments for intentional test case: The petition itself appears to be highly focused on, and critical of what they call the DHS “Interim Guidance Regarding Detention Authority for Applicants for Admission,” which according to the petition "claims that all noncitizens who entered the United States without inspection shall now be deemed “applicants for admission” and subject to mandatory detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A)." This is a new interpretation of the law that ICE and DHS appear to be intent to apply to this fellow. It is easy to see why, this new interpretation, if adopted by courts, would make their lives much easier. It also apparently has many other "test cases" pending which largely are being pursued in places like California that have mostly hostile judges, so DHS has fared quite poorly (at least according to the petition). On this last point, I think the petitioners really have a point. That new guidance is likely to fall and never be reviewed by SCOTUS because it is pretty dumb.
So, that is basically what I am able to glean from the very incomplete record in the case, because most of the documents are not available even to someone with a standard PACER account that normally gets you all the filings in most cases.
Wow, thanks for the scholarship. Amazing!
This seems like it could plausibly be the thing I was missing. Although I don’t think they need to take fingerprints to issue a NTA. Could be wrong about that though, not a domain expert here. If that's the case, and if ICE mentioned it in the documents that are not available through PACER but the judge ignored it, then I no longer think ICE was egregiously in the wrong here. Two ifs though.
Anyway, I'm pretty baffled by this case, it'll be interesting to see how it develops.
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