{snip}
D.H.S. is now detaining some seventy thousand people in jails across the country, more than at any other point since the department was founded, in 2002. Twenty-three immigrants have already died in custody in the current fiscal year, putting it on pace to surpass the previous one, which had the highest number of deaths in immigration detention in decades. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the Administration has opened new facilities, repurposed others closed by previous Administrations, and converted temporary holding cells at federal buildings in cities such as Los Angeles and New York into spaces for longer-term detention.
{snip}
Last summer, the Republican-controlled Congress gave D.H.S. forty-five billion dollars to build more jails. The appropriation, which came as part of the President’s domestic-spending bill, has kept ICE flush with cash during the shutdown. The Administration has used the money, in part, to begin to create a network of bigger facilities, investing thirty-eight billion dollars to buy up large warehouses across the country and retrofit them. One of them, near Camp East Montana, in a small city called Socorro, is expected to hold eighty-five hundred people. So is another, in Social Circle, Georgia, which, according to the Times, would be “larger than any single jail or prison building in America.”
A major reason that so many immigrants are being locked up is a government policy to deny them bond. Last July, the acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, issued a memo in which he claimed, in a radical and dubious reinterpretation of a twenty-nine-year-old statute, that the agency can automatically detain people who are in the country unlawfully and keep them in detention while they fight their cases. Ordinarily, unless a detained person had very recently entered the U.S., he could post bond if an immigration judge found that he didn’t pose a threat to public safety or represent a flight risk. This was the policy during the previous five Administrations, including during Trump’s first term.
But early last year Trump shrank the size of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the top appellate body overseeing the immigration courts, which are run out of the Department of Justice. Two months after the Lyons memo, the board issued a ruling instructing immigration judges to deny bond to anyone in detention with a legal case pending who had at some point entered the U.S. without inspection. The result has been a flood of habeas-corpus petitions filed in federal courts—more than fifteen thousand in the past two months alone. Most of the people submitting these requests have no criminal record, and many have lived in the U.S. for decades.
{snip}
In January, D.H.S. launched an arrest campaign in West Virginia, called Operation Country Roads, which was largely eclipsed by the situation in Minnesota. Drivers were targeted on state roadways, then held for extended periods without criminal charges. A federal judge wrote late last month that armed agents in unmarked cars who did not have warrants were “seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them.” He added that the practice was “deliberate” in its “elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force.” Such warnings should be impossible to ignore.
The post Trump’s Mass-Detention Campaign appeared first on American Renaissance.
American RenaissanceRead More
R1
T1
