Choosing Democracy: ICE Out Rally. Feb.27. Sacramento

Choosing Democracy: ICE Out Rally. Feb.27. Sacramento:  

The Constitution and Due Process

 Trump recently told an interviewer he didn’t know whether the Constitution required him to uphold due process rights of noncitizens. He also lamented the extraordinary burden of providing individual hearings for millions of immigrants marked for deportation.

He said on Truth Social that “our Court System is not letting me do the job I was Elected to do. Activist judges must let the Trump Administration deport murderers, and other criminals who have come into our Country illegally, WITHOUT DELAY!!!”

Trump adviser Stephen Miller rails almost daily against what he calls a “judicial coup” of rulings upholding the due process rights of immigrants. Miller scoffs at the notion that people Trump claims are “terrorists” must be allowed to contest their deportations, saying they only have the right to be deported. 

Miller has also raised the specter of suspending the right to habeas corpus — the age-old right to challenge being taken into custody in the first place. 

Federal judges have been pushing back — requiring that the regime accord due process to people facing deportation. 

Last month, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident with protected status who was wrongfully deported to a Salvadoran detention facility. In that decision, the court said with one voice that Abrego Garcia should have been given the opportunity to challenge his detention and deportation.

Here are four things you should know: 

1. The Constitution clearly guarantees “due process” to all “person[s].” The Constitution’s 5th Amendment says “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” The word “person” makes no distinction between citizens and noncitizens. (The 14th Amendment makes this applicable to the states as well.) 

2. The Supreme Court has long held that this promise extends to immigrants in deportation proceedings. In a 1993 opinion, Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292, Justice Antonin Scalia — hardly a left-wing extremist — wrote that “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

3. Due process doesn’t always require a full trial, however. At the least, immigrants facing deportation are entitled to: 

(1) notice of the charges against them (the government must provide an immigrant with a charging document, often called a “notice to appear,” outlining the reasons for potential deportation). 

(2) The opportunity to present evidence before an immigration judge to show why they should not be deported (e.g., asylum, student visa, green card, cancellation of removal). 

(3) A judgment based on the facts of the case and applicable immigration law. 

(4) the right to appeal the decision to a higher court. 

4. The right to habeas corpus is fundamental to our legal system. Defandents have used habeas corpus to challenge detentions by government officials since 13th-century England and the Magna Carta. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 84, “The subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.” 

Hence, the framers provided in the U.S. Constitution that the writ of habeas corpus, carried over from British law, “shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” 

Needless to say, we are not now experiencing rebellion or invasion. Moreover, despite what Miller suggests, the authority to suspend the writ is placed in Article I, which outlines the powers of Congress, and not Article II, which lists those of the executive branch. 

***

Some judges have warned that the Trump regime’s efforts to deny immigrants due process could easily expand to other groups, including American citizens. 

What happens if ICE decides that the definition of an “American citizen” doesn’t apply to someone who has spoken out against the regime, for example? What happens if habeas corpus is suspended and all Americans are in danger of arbitrary punishment? 

A growing number of jurists have framed this fight as existential for all Americans’ fundamental rights, not just those of immigrants. They’re right.

Robert Reich

We are all in this together. 

Heritage Foundation Creates and Shares Fake News About Immigrants Voting in Georgia

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/us/politics/heritage-foundation-2024-campaign-immigration.html?

The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state’s office called one video “a stunt.”

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Once a staid think tank, the Heritage Foundation has recently made its mark seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.\

 

By Ken Bensinger and Richard Fausset

Sept. 7, 2024Updated 10:09 a.m. ET

 

In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote.

Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote.

Although the two men claimed to represent a company helping Latinos navigate the election system, they were actually working with the Heritage Foundation and carrying a hidden camera. Days later, the conservative think tank posted a video on the social media platform X containing some of the footage the men had captured, calling it “staggering” evidence that 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia — which Heritage said extrapolated to more than 47,000 people — were registered to vote.

“Based on our findings,” the video concluded, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.”

 

The video was reposted by Elon Musk, X’s owner, who called it “extremely disturbing.” It quickly went viral.

 

But under scrutiny, those claims do not hold up. Three of the seven people Heritage filmed later said they had misspoken. State investigators found no evidence that any of the seven people on the tape had ever registered to vote. A spokesman for Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called the video “a stunt.”

It was one of several misleading videos that the Heritage Foundation has pumped into social media feeds this year. While the once-staid think tank has received attention recently for Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a future Trump administration that the group funded, it has also made its mark with an aggressive effort to shape public opinion, seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.

 

 

 

California Immigrants

https://calbudgetcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Data-Hit_Half-of-All-California-Workers-Are-Immigrants-or-Children-of-Immigrants.pdf

Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal taxes each year

Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal taxes each year

Here’s how they do it.  Alexia Fernandez Campbell ( no relation) 

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/13/17229018/undocumented-immigrants-pay-taxes