Much of America’s legal heritage stems from the need to restrain abuses from government, and many of our enumerated rights were enumerated because abuse by government made it necessary to explicitly state these rights, including “restrictive” ones that restricted the government explicitly. The government must enforce legitimate law, but must do under the limitations placed upon it because the rights of the people outweigh the collective will of the state.
Such is the case of immigration law and illegal immigrants. As the late Sonny Bono said of illegal immigration: “It’s illegal. Enforce the law”. But in enforcing the law, the government must be bound by the law that compels it to function. This includes the limitations on government to prevent abuse.
While it may be an explanation that a relative dearth of enforcement has led to an acceptance of excesses, it is not an excuse. It is an appeal to an existential fierce urgency if not an outright demand for emotional catharsis, but of which are considered by some as trumping very real government abuse. The excuse that “if you did nothing wrong or aren’t an illegal, then you have nothing to worry about” isn’t much of an excuse when it turns out that citizens have been victim of this enforcement zealousness, and people in general finding themselves outside the protection of the law.
United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has an increasing record of detaining American Citizens. One might think that an agency charges with dealing with immigration wouldn’t arrest or detain American Citizens, yet they have done so repeatedly, with some American Citizens being detained multiple times, or for photographing agents.
The core problem is that they aren’t targeting specific law breakers but rather a broad array of people who fit a profile. This, in and of itself, might be defensible if it didn’t include arrest or detention of American Citizens who are guilty of nothing more than being the wrong race with the wrong accent in the wrong place.
“But if you’re a U.S. citizen, you’re not required by law to carry anything. And remember, a driver’s license is not necessarily proof of citizenship, because 19 states and the District of Columbia allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Are Latino U.S. citizens supposed to carry around their passports at all times? Wear your best suit everywhere you go, and think you look too well-dressed to be an illegal immigrant?”
Oh, and this seems to exclude hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from Europe and Canada.
“By the way, the U.S. has an estimated 775,000 illegal immigrants from Europe and Canada, and it seems safe to assume a good chunk of those folks are white. How worried are those folks about being stopped by ICE when walking down the street? If you’re white, how much time do you spend worrying about accidentally getting swept up in an ICE raid? My guess is not much.”
In other cases, they have detained people without formal charges or without even determining whether the person is an illegal alien or not who must be deported for over a month while restricting access to a lawyer! Abuse is going on, and ignoring it won’t make the government less abusive. Even dogs aren’t safe.
This isn’t some manichean choice between letting illegal aliens run rampant and an unconstrained ICE grabbing American Citizens willy-nilly. As Theodore Roosevelt noted:
