With calls for immigration crackdowns and mass deportations, we remind everyone that the law and the Constitution must be always followed and New York City taxpayers just paid a big price for city officials who broke the law years ago.
In one of the city’s largest settlements ever, it has agreed to pay $92.5 million to up to 20,000 immigrants who were held in custody on behalf of ICE between 1997 and 2012, before the city stopped categorically cooperating with so-called detainers requesting immigrants be held past release dates.
The U.S. Constitution applies to everyone, regardless of immigration status, and that’s the whole thing, including First Amendment rights to free speech and free association, Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, Fifth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection and so on.
That someone has committed a civil immigration violation — which is not in and of itself any crime under federal law — does not strip away these protections.
When it comes to these “detainers,” what we’re talking about is someone held beyond when our criminal laws would allow it. Think about a person who has been cleared of all charges, acquitted or perhaps already completed their sentence.
“Free to go” means free to go and it is wrong for that person to then still be kept in criminal custody despite having, through the application of our own laws and due process, been released. Federal courts have agreed, not just in this case but others, finding that the feds lack the statutory authority to issue these detainers and that localities lack the legal rationale to actually honor them.
The term “sanctuary” gets tossed around a lot as if it signifies a jurisdiction that interferes with immigration enforcement, but that’s not really right. All sanctuary policies mean is that a local or state government won’t actively go above and beyond to assist with such enforcement via information collection and sharing and law enforcement cooperation.
New York City can’t do and is not doing anything to stop ICE from detaining people in the city, but it is under no responsibility to use its own resources to help, for reasons that go beyond some kind of bleeding-heart idea.
As we’ve noted repeatedly before, a program to really detain and potentially deport millions of immigrants would be socially, politically and economically ruinous for the country and NYC in particular. This city is nearly 40% foreign born, including a sizable chunk of undocumented immigrants, who form part of multiple workforces and whose removal would be devastating.
As to the cash settlement, many of the plaintiff class here might not only not get their cut of the money, but may have already long ago been deported. It’s too late for them, but the city must ensure this error is not repeated.
There are some extraordinary cases where public order and safety might dictate that the city engage in some cooperation, but that’s why we already have local laws facilitating that when people have been convicted of a number of what are considered serious crimes and when ICE produces a judicial warrant.
In those instances, there is clear authority to detain someone. But such situations are the anomaly, not the norm, and the city should be very careful about moving to change that.
