The Excuse is Immigration, But Federal Checkpoints Violate Everyone’s Rights

Via The Daily Bell

Federal agents set up shop in New Hampshire last week. They ran a Constitutionally-illegal checkpoint, violating the Fourth Amendment rights of countless Americans.

The big reward? They arrested 25 illegal immigrants, seven of them children. More than half of those detained had overstayed visas. That means they came to the U.S. legally in the first place and did not leave when their visa expired.

What could have spurred this callous disregard for the law? Well, a personal anecdote could shed some light on the situation.

A friend of mine from Brazil had a six-month visiting visa to the United States. He would come and stay with his uncle who had permanent residency. The way the rules work, it that my friend could use the visa as often as he wanted to travel to the United States, but couldn’t stay for longer than the six month period.

It was literally completely legal for him to fly to Brazil, spend the night, and fly back to the United States the next day. Then he could stay for another 6 months.

Being a rule follower, he did what the law said and flew back to Brazil where he stayed for about four months. The ticket to get back to the U.S. cost about $1,000. But when he arrived, he was denied entry to the United States. He was sent back to Brazil, and his visa was suspended for five years.

Why did this happen? After all, he followed all the rules. Officials said if he was staying 6 months at a time, he must have been working. Yes, because he stayed within the legal limits of his visa, the federal officials surmised that he must have violated the conditions of his visa.

Perhaps this unpredictability of U.S. Customs creates an incentive to overstay visas. Maybe the $1,000 plane tickets make it tempting to overstay a visa. Because maybe even if you follow the rules, you will arbitrarily be denied anyway, wasting your time, burning your money, and being separated from the rest of your family still in the States. Speaking of family, maybe the fact that many of the detained immigrants have kids in school in the U.S. means it is a ridiculous burden to make them leave every six months.

Yes, they broke the law. They broke complicated and restrictive immigration laws.

But why is it so important to follow immigration laws, while immigration officials completely disregard the Fourth Amendment?

Great job! Agents enforced immigration law by breaking Constitutional law. They stopped every car on I-93, without suspicion or probable cause. Generally, occupants of the vehicles are asked whether or not they are an American citizen.

If they refuse to answer, exercising their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, that is considered evidence of a crime, and they are detained for further questioning and possible search. Exercising a right is used as evidence of a crime. That is the point we have gotten to in the U.S.A. police state.

Using these illegal stop and search tactics, police found evidence of other crimes as well, unrelated to immigration.

The checkpoint also resulted in the seizure of two pounds of marijuana, as well as smaller amounts of cocaine, mushrooms and hash oil, all of which were seized from U.S. citizens, according to the Woodstock Police Department. In addition to the immigration detentions, 32 arrests were made for a range of infractions.

So there you have it, Americans’ Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights were violated so that federal agents could prosecute victimless crimes. The only true victims in this whole checkpoint situation were all the people stopped by the agents.

Perhaps you aren’t concerned with the illegal immigrants’ treatment. What you should be concerned about is the convenient excuse increased immigration enforcement gives federal agents to trample your rights.

The harder they go after illegal immigrants, the more Americans will be ensnared, and have their rights violated. They will be stopped at checkpoints, subjected to illegal searches, and forced to be a witness against themselves.

This is how the government operates. Whether it is under the guise of a drug war, illegal immigration, or terrorism, their guns are truly only aimed at one target. The American people.

Trump Deploys Dozens Of Judges To Battle Massive Backlog Of Deportation Cases

In response to the "paralysis" facing immigration courts, dealing with over 500,000 pending cases, President Trump is deploying 50 judges to immigration detention facilities across the United States, according to two sources and a letter seen by Reuters.

As the Associated Press points out, there are 58 immigration courts in 27 states around the country with a total of 301 judges.  The problem, of course, is that those 301 judges already face a mountain of 534,000 pending immigration cases which is likely to balloon even higher under Trump"s administration.

Of 374 authorized immigration judge positions, 301 are filled. Fifty more candidates are in various stages of the hiring process, which typically takes about a year, said Kathryn Mattingly, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

In all, more than 534,000 cases were pending before immigration courts nationwide in February, according to a recent memo from Kelly.

The massive backlog means that processing errors are a common occurrence and ultimately just result in illegal immigrants getting a free pass to reside in the country even longer, which is unacceptable to President Trump, and as Reuters reports the Department of Justice is also considering asking judges to sit from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., split between two rotating shifts, to adjudicate more cases, the sources said. A notice about shift times was not included in the letter.

Two sources familiar with the Justice Department"s plan said the department would ask more judges to volunteer for one or two month deployments at detention centers. If the department cannot find enough volunteers, the department would assign judges to detention centers, the sources said. Judges who volunteer for the first 50 deployments would be sent to detention centers in Adelanto, California; San Diego, Chicago and elsewhere, according to the letter.

Judges are employed by the Justice Department to oversee cases that determine if immigrants are given protections, such as asylum, or ordered deported. A handful of judges work from detention centers but most work from courts around the country.

Of course, as we noted previously, one way to relieve the court burden is to simply increase deportations without using the court system at all, a strategy that has the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants" Rights Project, and the 1,000s of immigration lawyers that earn a living filing appeal after appeal, up in arms.

Advocates worry the Trump administration will increase the use of procedures that allow authorities to deport people without using the court system at all.

"Instead of actually trying to make the courts better, they just want to use them less, even though that obviously is deeply problematic from a due-process standpoint," said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants" Rights Project.

Mehlman agrees the system is broken, but said advocacy groups and lawyers who keep filing new motions and appeals are part of the problem.

"They understand that time works to their benefit and that the longer you can drag this out, the more bites at the apple you can get, the greater the likelihood that you can find some plausible reason for remaining here in the United States," he said.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.