It's a civil matter but you are detained in criminal jails and prisons until the court can get around to listening to you. That in itself is criminal, and what one would expect from a third world banana republic, not a first world "free" country.
AFAICT it's illegal for ICE to incorrectly decide you are not a US citizen. If they made a mistake in their determination then they have violated the law. So citizens don't have a right to a lawyer because immigration law doesn't apply to US citizens. But if ICE is wrong they should get sued to hell and back and this penalty seems horrifying low for 3.5 years of wrongful imprisonment.
If you read to the end, you’ll see the government didn’t let him keep the settlement, since they only give you two years from the date of the arrest to sue, which he couldn’t do, since he was still in custody.
I’d expect minimum statutory damages for this sort of thing to be north of $10K / day, paid up front, and garnished from ICE’s payroll budget. However, I don’t make the rules.
Ok ... that sounds so cool. You would fail. You see, there is a slight problem. The government has legislated that this does not happen. And it doesn't happen. The only thing that can happen is that government employees do something they did not have the legal right to do, by abusing state power (unknown to them). For this they are ... personally liable. Gotta love what happens when you give people the authority to make the rules, don't you ? Such reasonable rules ...
So a judge has 2 choices (in most states):
Either he ignores you or gives you some token amount without making a big fuss out of it, for some bullshit reason (not for illegally detaining you, but for some bullshit but legal reason like illegally charging you some fee or something).
The other choice a judge has is to hold the people who actually did this personally liable ... and assigns real monetary damages. Not on the government, as the government explicitly forbade them from doing this, on the individuals. This will open those individuals to a slam-shut kidnapping case, which if the victim plays it correctly will lead to them receiving prison sentences. They cannot claim they didn't do it, because it's part of another court case's conclusion that they did it, including that it was illegal.
So a judge can either almost ignore you, or utterly destroy the lives of some 20 government employees that just did what they were told to do. At this point, you have to understand, those government employees' lives are utterly destroyed: they are very likely to go to jail, they'll have 6 or 7 figures in debt (enough to almost certainly lose all their possessions), garnished wages for a decade at least and can never work for government again (in other words, on top of everything else, they're fired from their job).
A reasonable person would say that a judge needs a third option: a way to tell the government that they fucked up lawmaking, assign damages based on that, and that laws need to come with clear details on what to do. That a rule like "no citizen may be arrested" must come with a clear and foolproof way to distinguish citizens from non-citizens to be valid, but judges are explicitly forbidden from doing this (you might even say the very definition of their job is to NEVER do this).
Why are the rules like this ? Government, the big exception to employer responsibility ? To save the government a buck.
Needless to say, unless there was a daily rape regimen, a judge will not do this. Frankly, even then it's probably not a reasonable thing to do.
> I’d expect minimum statutory damages for this sort of thing to be north of $10K / day, paid up front, and garnished from ICE’s payroll budget. However, I don’t make the rules.
Heh. It's funny what people think about government sometimes.
This is nothing. Read about what the IRS can legally do to you, without any recourse, or just search for horror stories on the internet, as they actually do those things regularly. Blocking all your bank accounts, then convicting you based on non-payment is normal for them.
That's one of the problems of people in general. If you give people essentially unlimited power (that's what Congress has, in theory), they're not going to be nice about using that power.
That means that government departments that see it as their mission to fix things in society, immigration, mental health, child support, veteran's affairs, ... well, frankly it is pretty well known among lawyers that things like constant human rights violations, outright criminal direct abuse (rape, beatings, ...), absurd imprisonment (e.g. solitary confinement for long periods), they're part of normal operation for a lot of these departments. For instance, did you know the odds of a kid getting raped or sexually assaulted are actually higher in the care of CPA than with abusive parents ? Despite, of course, that the whole point of CPA is to lower these occurrences ? The same goes with metal-health related suicides: they're actually higher when patients are "being treated" in mental health hospitals that without any care (which means, no forced care).
People just seem utterly unable to admit or believe that attempts to fix things are making matters worse, so these things just do not get resolved.
> Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport.
So, carry your passport on you personally at all times? And hope you never lose your wallet/purse?
It should be the government's responsibility to ensure you're not a citizen, but until they do this reliabily, you can get a U.S. passport card. It proves citizenship and is credit card sized.
If my very limited understanding of this is correct, this is a perfect real-life example of a Catch-22: citizens have no right to an attorney if arrested by immigration because immigration cannot legally arrest citizens.
Right. But all they have to do is “have reason” to “doubt” your claim to be an American citizen. Or say you’re not the person you’re claiming to be, who they freely admit is an American citizen. Or claim that your citizenship is invalid because it was obtained via deception (which is now a thing).
> "claim that your citizenship is invalid because it was obtained via deception"
This cannot be simply asserted by ICE. To revoke naturalized citizenship, the government must initiate denaturalization proceedings in U.S. District Court in front of an Article III judge.
If my knowledge of history is correct, slaves in the US had to right to sue, unless they were sueing to claim that they were not actually slaves; since, until the court decided the suit, it was possible that they were not actually slaves, and so they had to be given the right to be heard in court.
It doesn't matter if you're actually a citizen. If the government refuses to admit your citizenship, how do you get them to admit your rights apply?
I would love to get more clarification on this as well. It seems to me that if there is doubt about your citizenship, we should lean towards better safe than sorry and just grant you a lawyer, period.
The US justice system is (ostensibly, if not always in practice) based on the idea that protecting innocent people is more important than punishing guilty people. If you're being tried to see if you're a citizen, I would prefer we assume you're innocent until proven guilty and grant you a lawyer.
Is the reality as bad as people are suggesting? Is there some kind of reasoning behind this?
Legally I have no idea what the government claims applies or does not, but reading the declaration it seems pretty clear that the founders had the still-radical notion that most/all of these fundamental rights apply to all people ("men", in the text, and "[white] men" in practice). There wasn't even such a thing as "American" when it was written.
If the US thinks the bill of rights should only apply to citizens of the US, the US is morally bankrupt.
I don't see what guarantees of due process and other human rights have to do with libertarianism. I'm pretty sure that (just to use a politically distant example) your average socialist would also view this as something the government shouldn't be able to do.
Anarchism is the proper response to all of these abuses.
In the same way that your car breaking down means you should abandon it forever and just walk everywhere you want to go. It’s also a good idea, if you ever get food poisoning, to just stop eating forever.
It’s never a good idea to try and fix what’s wrong, just throw it all away.
Anarchy means without leaders [0]. There are many types of anarchism that have a flat hierarchic structure and could still be considered organizations.
What parent was suggesting is closer to nihilism, which is a common misunderstanding because in films anarchism is generally portrayed as nihilism[1].
Anarchism is an opposition to arbitrary authority. Anarchism is not a breakdown, but a response to a breakdown. I.e., the lies we are told about authority by authority break down when viewed in the light of our experiences with authority. When we disbelieve those lies, we turn to anarchism.
It's hard to fix a system when you have to use the system to fix itself. Better to reduce the attack surface as much as possible by reducing the list of illegal things. Fight tooth and nail to keep the bureaucracy from growing, and take a hatchet to whatever already exists whenever political opportunity presents itself.
> immigration control...is something it's supposed to be doing
This is not a belief that enjoys consensus. I don't want my government telling people where they can and cannot move, nor do I think it has any moral authority to draw imaginary lines on the earth.
> ... nor do I think it has any moral authority to draw imaginary lines on the earth.
Do you intend for that position to include personal property rights? There are some days when I'm just tired and would love to flop on the nearest bed, regardless of who lives in that house/apartment.
> Do you intend for that position to include personal property rights?
No I don't.
A sense of boundaries for a person or small community does strike me as so completely contrary to nature as an authority which claims dominion over an entire continent.
Brief math reminder, 1273 days is over three years, which is a shockingly long time for the result to simply be "Oh, here's 20k. Not that we did anything wrong.".
> After Watson was freed, he sued the government for false imprisonment and won an $82,500 judgment. Then a federal appeals court took it away, ruling that while Watson was in detention he missed the two-year deadline to file his claim.
> Surprised by his unexplained freedom, Watson walked out of a federal detention center in rural Alabama. He recalled how he was penniless, in prison garb and thousands of miles from home when he approached strangers at a gas station to borrow a phone.
The greater the pain inflicted on undesirables, the more that ICE pleases its key constituency. If the law is applied unfairly, if the law is broken, that only serves to enhance ICE's reputation as an organization willing to get the job done no matter what it takes, a la Charles Bronson in Death Wish.
Lawyers: Don't these detainees have a habeas corpus claim, which, as I understand it, compels the government to justify detention? Isn't this kind of situation the intended 'use case' for habeas?
IANAL, but if ICE actually detained a U.S. citizen, wouldn't the citizen have the right to file a habeas petition regardless of the "immigration" nature of detention?
I'm sure the saavy dont get caught by ICE, but americans have been actually deported so maybe they are not encouraged or prevented from doing so. (if they dont get assigned a public defender for example).
It seems like this was not a mistake in identifying him as a citizen - there was a question if he was legally a citizen:
> Even after ICE realized the error in identifying his parents, federal lawyers refused to free Watson. They seized on a new U.S. reading of Jamaican law to argue Watson should be deported because his father was not his legal guardian when they left the island nation.
...
> An immigration judge ordered him deported. The Board of Immigration Appeals agreed.
>It was only when Watson’s appeal reached U.S. District Court and a court-appointed attorney pressed ICE that immigration authorities conducted the internal legal review they should have done when Watson first claimed to be a citizen. The review found the government had misinterpreted an arcane aspect of immigration law. ICE abruptly freed Watson.
Based on my reading, it is a mistake at first, but when the government discovered the mistake, they just pressed on and tried to argue that actually he wasn't a citizen anyway.
Naturally this offends anyone who cares about the rule of law. But does the rule of law matter in today's America? What's the point of discussing the finer technicalities of law if they don't lead you to a solution?
But, God forbid, we issue people identifiers and keep a full tally of the citizens. You either have a proper identity management or stories like this (and identity theft and fraud and many other unpleasant things). It is the conscious choice of the society not to maintain proper records for the fear of overreach and these are the consequences.
Yet if any organization uses overreach as a fundamental tactic it is ICE (along with DEA and NSA). I am no fan of conspiracy theories and in fact am typically favorable towards using government as an implementation of common policy, yet I can certainly also recognize a systems problem.
Maybe someone can clear this up; when I get into the US on vacation, my fingerprints and iris are stored. Then when I walk from the plane to customs there are a ton of cameras, they scan my passport (which has biometric info and my photo), then they take a photo of me. This is not the same for citizens? I would imagine it would be quite easy to figure out who is who with all that info? If Americans never fly, do they not have biometrics on these people?
> Carrillo’s arrest highlights pitfalls in ICE’s digitally driven search for the deportable. At the core of the hunt are massive federal databases containing records on citizenship, crime, foreign travel, education and work.
ICE should not be using these databases for this purpose. This is a really low quality way to do police work. The amount of water you need to pump through the baleen to get a meal has to be enormous and foreign key relationships will be some substring match. Using these databases as the source of the crime will be so rife with errors as to be unethical. This is not unlike the famous case, Buttle vs Tuttle [0]
68 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] thread> Carrillo sued for false imprisonment and was awarded a $20,000 settlement, but ICE made no admission of wrongdoing
This is a shockingly small sum.
Wow, that's scary. Has this been recently challenged?
I’d expect minimum statutory damages for this sort of thing to be north of $10K / day, paid up front, and garnished from ICE’s payroll budget. However, I don’t make the rules.
So a judge has 2 choices (in most states):
Either he ignores you or gives you some token amount without making a big fuss out of it, for some bullshit reason (not for illegally detaining you, but for some bullshit but legal reason like illegally charging you some fee or something).
The other choice a judge has is to hold the people who actually did this personally liable ... and assigns real monetary damages. Not on the government, as the government explicitly forbade them from doing this, on the individuals. This will open those individuals to a slam-shut kidnapping case, which if the victim plays it correctly will lead to them receiving prison sentences. They cannot claim they didn't do it, because it's part of another court case's conclusion that they did it, including that it was illegal.
So a judge can either almost ignore you, or utterly destroy the lives of some 20 government employees that just did what they were told to do. At this point, you have to understand, those government employees' lives are utterly destroyed: they are very likely to go to jail, they'll have 6 or 7 figures in debt (enough to almost certainly lose all their possessions), garnished wages for a decade at least and can never work for government again (in other words, on top of everything else, they're fired from their job).
A reasonable person would say that a judge needs a third option: a way to tell the government that they fucked up lawmaking, assign damages based on that, and that laws need to come with clear details on what to do. That a rule like "no citizen may be arrested" must come with a clear and foolproof way to distinguish citizens from non-citizens to be valid, but judges are explicitly forbidden from doing this (you might even say the very definition of their job is to NEVER do this).
Why are the rules like this ? Government, the big exception to employer responsibility ? To save the government a buck.
Needless to say, unless there was a daily rape regimen, a judge will not do this. Frankly, even then it's probably not a reasonable thing to do.
Heh. It's funny what people think about government sometimes.
This is nothing. Read about what the IRS can legally do to you, without any recourse, or just search for horror stories on the internet, as they actually do those things regularly. Blocking all your bank accounts, then convicting you based on non-payment is normal for them.
That's one of the problems of people in general. If you give people essentially unlimited power (that's what Congress has, in theory), they're not going to be nice about using that power.
That means that government departments that see it as their mission to fix things in society, immigration, mental health, child support, veteran's affairs, ... well, frankly it is pretty well known among lawyers that things like constant human rights violations, outright criminal direct abuse (rape, beatings, ...), absurd imprisonment (e.g. solitary confinement for long periods), they're part of normal operation for a lot of these departments. For instance, did you know the odds of a kid getting raped or sexually assaulted are actually higher in the care of CPA than with abusive parents ? Despite, of course, that the whole point of CPA is to lower these occurrences ? The same goes with metal-health related suicides: they're actually higher when patients are "being treated" in mental health hospitals that without any care (which means, no forced care).
People just seem utterly unable to admit or believe that attempts to fix things are making matters worse, so these things just do not get resolved.
> Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport.
So, carry your passport on you personally at all times? And hope you never lose your wallet/purse?
"As a matter of law, ICE cannot assert its civil immigration enforcement authority to arrest and/or detain a U.S. citizen." https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/when-ice-tries-...
If my very limited understanding of this is correct, this is a perfect real-life example of a Catch-22: citizens have no right to an attorney if arrested by immigration because immigration cannot legally arrest citizens.
This cannot be simply asserted by ICE. To revoke naturalized citizenship, the government must initiate denaturalization proceedings in U.S. District Court in front of an Article III judge.
But ICE also has criminal enforcement authority, where applicable.
It doesn't matter if you're actually a citizen. If the government refuses to admit your citizenship, how do you get them to admit your rights apply?
I would love to get more clarification on this as well. It seems to me that if there is doubt about your citizenship, we should lean towards better safe than sorry and just grant you a lawyer, period.
The US justice system is (ostensibly, if not always in practice) based on the idea that protecting innocent people is more important than punishing guilty people. If you're being tried to see if you're a citizen, I would prefer we assume you're innocent until proven guilty and grant you a lawyer.
Is the reality as bad as people are suggesting? Is there some kind of reasoning behind this?
If the US thinks the bill of rights should only apply to citizens of the US, the US is morally bankrupt.
In the same way that your car breaking down means you should abandon it forever and just walk everywhere you want to go. It’s also a good idea, if you ever get food poisoning, to just stop eating forever.
It’s never a good idea to try and fix what’s wrong, just throw it all away.
What parent was suggesting is closer to nihilism, which is a common misunderstanding because in films anarchism is generally portrayed as nihilism[1].
Anarchism is an opposition to arbitrary authority. Anarchism is not a breakdown, but a response to a breakdown. I.e., the lies we are told about authority by authority break down when viewed in the light of our experiences with authority. When we disbelieve those lies, we turn to anarchism.
This is not a belief that enjoys consensus. I don't want my government telling people where they can and cannot move, nor do I think it has any moral authority to draw imaginary lines on the earth.
Do you intend for that position to include personal property rights? There are some days when I'm just tired and would love to flop on the nearest bed, regardless of who lives in that house/apartment.
No I don't.
A sense of boundaries for a person or small community does strike me as so completely contrary to nature as an authority which claims dominion over an entire continent.
> After Watson was freed, he sued the government for false imprisonment and won an $82,500 judgment. Then a federal appeals court took it away, ruling that while Watson was in detention he missed the two-year deadline to file his claim.
Kafka would be proud methinks...
https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Wa...
> Surprised by his unexplained freedom, Watson walked out of a federal detention center in rural Alabama. He recalled how he was penniless, in prison garb and thousands of miles from home when he approached strangers at a gas station to borrow a phone.
The show Adam Ruins everything explains how minors of age that dont speak english dont have lawyers and go to court alone...
> Even after ICE realized the error in identifying his parents, federal lawyers refused to free Watson. They seized on a new U.S. reading of Jamaican law to argue Watson should be deported because his father was not his legal guardian when they left the island nation.
...
> An immigration judge ordered him deported. The Board of Immigration Appeals agreed.
>It was only when Watson’s appeal reached U.S. District Court and a court-appointed attorney pressed ICE that immigration authorities conducted the internal legal review they should have done when Watson first claimed to be a citizen. The review found the government had misinterpreted an arcane aspect of immigration law. ICE abruptly freed Watson.
Were his attorneys just incompetent before?
Yet if any organization uses overreach as a fundamental tactic it is ICE (along with DEA and NSA). I am no fan of conspiracy theories and in fact am typically favorable towards using government as an implementation of common policy, yet I can certainly also recognize a systems problem.
ICE should not be using these databases for this purpose. This is a really low quality way to do police work. The amount of water you need to pump through the baleen to get a meal has to be enormous and foreign key relationships will be some substring match. Using these databases as the source of the crime will be so rife with errors as to be unethical. This is not unlike the famous case, Buttle vs Tuttle [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/nWbIxFKtTmE?t=91