The American immigration system had regular procedural problems before Trump finds himself

Last Friday, immigration and customs agents (ICE) Arressed the mayor of Newark Ras Baraka Outside a detention center. Baraka was trying to visit the establishment – which opened recently and is operated by the GEO Group, a private prison company – with members of the New Jersey Congress Delegation. Baraka was denied entry, but arrested by agents of the ICE internal security surveys, even if he is an American citizen. He was finally charged before a federal court of an intrusion chief and released from the guard After several hours.

Baraka’s arrest was only one of the many recent immigration developments that could easily have taken an entire information cycle, alongside customs and border protection (CBP) Ask the Hasan Piker popular streamer And the White House advisor Stephen Miller suspend constitutional law at You have a body. But although Trump’s actions may seem unprecedented, it is based on infrastructure built over the decades, largely with bipartite support. The difference is now that Trump uses it to target anyone and everyone, including American citizens who criticize their policies.

The American immigration law grants an astonishing quantity of power to the executive branch. Although there is legislation in place governing the number of people who can legally migrate to the United States during a given year and dictate the reasons for deportability, most other immigration policies are largely found in the discretion of the president, especially when the congress is blocked. The law determines who can come to the United States and which can be removed; The president decides to proceed with these moves.

Our immigration laws were often written with specific targets: Communists in the 1950sterrorists in the 2000s. Congress established the Ministry of Internal Security (DHS) After September 11, ostensibly to protect the Americans from the “terrorist threat” who was hiding everywhere. The DHS has merged the application of immigration with national security, trampling on the civil rights of each in the process. At the time, civilian libertarians warned that the vast supervision powers granted to the DHS and its many component agencies would allow the government to monitor almost anyone.

The immigration application regime post-September 11 is a DRAGNET by design. In the distorted logic of war against terrorism, mass surveillance was a small price to pay to eliminate threats to national security, which, by their very nature, surreptitiously operated. Legislators could excuse the dysfunctions of this system before Trump due to the fervor of the beginning of the century on terrorism and, above all, because of a set of standards which, according to them, could remain in place throughout their lives.

Under an authoritarian naked administration, limits the executive – implicit and explicit power – no longer exists because the president says that they do not and that’s it. Only a few months after his second term, Trump demonstrated that if a court dares to govern against him, he will simply challenge their orders. The congress, closely controlled by the Republicans who know the values ​​of Trump, above all, does not want to lead any significant monitoring of the executive branch. The check and sales system only matters if we all agree that it matters.

The regular procedure is another of these things that everyone is acquired until it left – but that, for many immigrants, was already tenuous. Trump and several other members of his administration have recently claimed That non-citizens are not entitled to regular procedure and that people who are legally in the United States have nothing to fear. This is obviously not true, because the ice recently arrested an American citizen And refused to release him even after his family produced his birth certificate, which was also checked by a federal judge. The man has been released from the ice custody, but the fact remains that the regular procedure is what prevents ice from expeling people without cause in the first place.

It should be noted that the ice has Wrongly deported American citizens in the past. This is not a unique problem in Trump; If anything is proof that what goes on for a regular procedure in the immigration system was a farce before he even took office. Unlike people accused of a crime, people in expulsion procedures do not obtain free advice and appointed by the government if they cannot afford to hire their own lawyers. He is not part of a prosecutor to prove that someone is deportable but on the person confronted with expulsion to prove that he does not. Even this minimum form of regular procedure is too much for the Trump administration, which sought to strip people in the procedures for returning the most fundamental legal protections.

Trump also expressed his interest in exhaust American citizensTelling journalists that it was open to the idea of ​​sending “local criminals” to Cecot, the Salvador prison to which the DHS expelled Venezuelan migrants under the Act on Extraterrestrial enemies. Without practically no evidence, the Trump administration accused the migrants deported to Cecot of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren of Aragua.

Unlike migrants expelled to El Salvador without audiences, Baraka was released from the guard after a few hours. Piker was authorized in the United States after questioning. The two men are American citizens, which means that they cannot be legally removed or refused when entering the country. This does not mean that this did not happen before: in the mid -1950s, American citizens were trapped in “Operation Wetback”, A Mass expulsion campaign Intended for Mexicans-Americans designed by the ICE precursor, immigration and naturalization services. Some historians believe that half of the two million people American citizens were withdrawn from the United States under the operation.

These new shows of force are always alarming signs that the Trump administration is willing to use the immigration system to go after anyone its administration judges a threat or an enemy. It is easy to say that Trump Bafouage any attempt to check his power, that he behaves like an authoritarian. The two statements are correct and deserve to be repeated, but they do not tell the whole story. Regarding immigration, Trump works for the most part in the rules rather than against them. His actions do not indicate the unique depravity of his administration, but the banal cruelty of the system works largely as planned.

In the establishment of the DHS, the Congress expanded the surveillance state beyond the intelligence agencies, granting the executive branch an additional license to keep an eye on all our borders, non-citizens or other, in the name of national security. The congress gave the president the discretion to decide how, when and to deport non-citizens. Now Trump pushes this discretion to his limits, and few people seem to have achieved how much this push could go.