Papers, Please

While our focus has, rightly, been on the unlawful extraordinary rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador and the administration’s continued brazen defiance of the Supreme Court, we have apparently reached the point where people, citizens and immigrants alike, are literally being picked up off the street and held in confinement and often incommunicado until they can prove they are US citizens. We are just three months into Trump’s autocratic takeover and we have already arrived at the “papers, please” stage again.

I say “again” because we’ve seen all this before in Trump’s first term where CBP in multiple states boarded buses and demanded the occupants provide proof of citizenship and detained those who could not provide it. An Inspector General’s report also showed that CBP violated court orders as it enforced Trump’s Muslim travel ban. CBP and ICE kidnapped children from their parents and now six years later there are still over 1300 children who have been unable to reconnect with their parents. We are again seeing ICE invading courts to make arrests and children as young as 4 being forced to represent themselves in deportation hearings.

We already know that the vast majority of those already unlawfully denied due process and sent to prison in El Salvador had no criminal record and evidence for their supposed gang membership is virtually non-existent or fabricated. It now appears that around 30 of those people have been essentially “disappeared”, neither acknowledged by the US or the Salvadoran governments. It’s also possible that other immigrants are being renditioned to countries other than El Salvador. An Iraqi man who has legal status to remain in this country under a refugee program was targeted for deportation using evidence a federal judge found “simply not plausible”. Since he cannot be legally deported back to Iraq since he faces execution there, the Trump administration has relocated him to Rwanda under a new agreement between the two countries, with plans to do the same for others in similar situations. While both cases are horrifying, it’s important to understand the crucial difference. The man sent to Rwanda is at least, apparently, free to move about in the country and even leave it. The men in El Salvador are being held in prison despite not having been convicted or, in some cases, even charged with a crime. The former is deportation as we know it; the latter is unlawful rendition.

Tourists are also now being temporarily disappeared into the black hole that is run by CBP and ICE. Tourists with valid visas are being detained with no explanation. Some are being held incommunicado for weeks, sometimes more than a month, with at least one person spending time in solitary confinement. Many are still held even after they offer to self-deport voluntarily. As a result, at least a dozen countries have issued advisories against traveling to the United States. In addition, many longer-term foreign visitors, such as students and those with work visas, are being warned not to leave the country for fear they may be refused entry on return. Unsurprisingly, foreigners with second homes here in the US are now abandoning them in droves and the US tourism industry is facing billions in losses as foreigners stop coming here.

Increasingly, US citizens are getting caught up in the Trump administration’s broad immigration crackdown. Last week, CBP agents boarded a train in Montana and demanded citizenship information from its passengers. The administration and its local partners are clearly engaged in widespread racial profiling which is always going to involve some US citizens. The Venezuelans who were renditioned to El Salvador are there simply because they are Venezuelans, not because there is any substantive evidence they were gang members. In upstate New York, local police are stopping Hispanic workers and drivers for unprovable traffic violations and turning them over to CBP. In Arizona, an intellectually challenged Hispanic American citizen asked a CBP officer for directions and was promptly arrested and detained for 10 days until his family could produce evidence of his citizenship. His case also highlights CBP’s demand that detainees sign statements that they clearly may not understand, either because they are illiterate like the Arizona man or tricked into signing documents that put their legal status at risk.

An even more disturbing case occurred in Florida where a man was arrested under a new law that made it a crime for illegal aliens to enter the state and held for two days in an ICE detention center. First, the man was a US citizen but either a language barrier or (more probably) his claims of citizenship were ignored. Second, a federal judge had already stayed any enforcement of this law which Florida police clearly ignored. And third, ICE is not supposed to hold US citizens. It took his family producing his birth certificate and state ID card to get him released. There have been multiple other reports of temporary detention of US citizens until they can “prove” their bona fides across the country. And now we have finally seen our first deportation of a US citizen – a 2 year-old child who was deported with her mother without any due process and against the father’s wishes that the child remain in the US. Two other US citizens, also children aged 4 and 7, have also been deported after being held incommunicado by ICE with their families so that they had no access to legal representation.

Many officials in the administration, including Trump himself, have declared the desire to deport (i.e. rendition) American citizens. In addition, Trump is trying to revoke the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, which is why it may not be an accident that the aforementioned 2-year old was deported since that is the basis of her citizenship. To that end, they are focused on threatening and intimidating those who might provide legal impediments to their plans. The harassment of immigration lawyers is part of the more widespread attempt to intimidate the legal profession and erode the rule of law. A Michigan lawyer who had represented student protestors of the war in Gaza was detained at the border and immigration officials demanded to search his phone which contained conversations covered by attorney-client privilege. A Dallas lawyer who briefly advised a family about their rights if they were detained by ICE was only a few hours later visited by federal officials who both refused to identify themselves but also accused the lawyer of interfering with an immigration investigation. What started with lawyers has now moved on to judges. A Wisconsin state judge has been arrested at the courthouse where she worked for obstructing an immigration investigation. Unsurprisingly, the details don’t support the allegation. And now the Attorney General is openly threatening judges with prosecution.

Nowhere is this administration’s descent into fascism more evident than in its immigration policies directed by Stephen Miller. The administration is quite openly defying the Supreme Court in the Abrego Garcia case, with the President admitting he’s made no effort to precipitate the detainees return. ICE is now contradicting what the DOJ has told the Supreme Court about deportations while habeas corpus challenges are being heard. ICE is arresting people without warrants and the DOJ is now authorizing ICE to enter individual’s homes without a warrant as well.

Most people are aware that the border is a constitutional grey zone where certain protections like those limiting search and seizure no longer apply. What most people do not understand is that border, and therefore that constitutional grey zone, extends 100 miles inland, an area that includes around two-thirds of the US population. Combine that with the fact that CBP and its companion agency ICE are notorious for corruption and excessive use of force and it is easy to understand why immigration is the area in which we are farthest down the road to autocracy under this administration.