By arresting people who are showing at immigration court hearings, the Trump administration is subverting the rule of law and making it more likely that people will evade and avoid court.
Court is supposed to be a place where immigration claims, often for asylum, can get sorted out and individuals can potentially maintain the right to stay in the country.
For people around the country this week, including in NYC’s immigration courts, that purpose was harmed as ICE agents waited in hallways to arrest people whose cases had just been unexpectedly dismissed by the ICE prosecutors inside.
The operation seems to have been coordinated by the Trump administration to juice detentions in one place where they knew immigrants would be gathering — because of course it had directed them to be there. As one distraught father told an Associated Press reporter after his 22-year-old son’s arrest at an immigration court in Miami, “we thought coming here was a good thing.”
The government’s endgame appears to be to put these folks in expedited removal proceedings, which would allow them to be deported without additional judicial process — except, of course, if they were to claim credible fear of return to their home countries, in which case they would end up right back an immigration court again, now starting from zero.
To make that happen, though, they would have to know to make that claim and understand their rights. That’s why figures like immigration czar Tom Homan have balked so much at efforts to alert people about their rights: this administration does not want people to know what they’re entitled to under our laws.
This perhaps more than anything else puts the lie to the notion that the administration wants people to follow the law. The group of people who are attending their immigration court hearings are precisely the people who are striving to comply with the legal obligations the government has imposed on them. Hardened criminals are not voluntarily attending court hearings and fighting their cases out. Now, this effort to follow the law is being rewarded with a trip to detention.
What exactly does Homeland Security think it’s encouraging? If immigrants feel like doing what officials ask is a good way to get arrested, then they’re not going to do it. Even well-meaning people with strong cases are incentivized to avoid coming to immigration hearings and instead try to evade the authorities and fall out of compliance.
In truth, DHS is encouraging people to stop complying with the law. We imagine Donald Trump and his advisors see this as a benefit, not a problem. The harder they make complying with the law, the more they can claim that immigrants are outside the law.
This has been the strategy all along: declare that all immigrants are criminals and cheats and then work backwards, going to great lengths to find reasons to paint individuals like Kilmar Abrego García as dangerous and making everyone else’s actual compliance with the law an ever-evolving minefield that they can’t get out of, so they can wash their hands of their due process violations and ruinous efforts to end this nation’s immigration legacy.
The public should see these efforts for what they are: a rogue government that’ll do whatever it wants.
