Good.
A group of Hispanic Texans are asking a federal judge to rule that ICE agents can’t detain U.S. citizens or require those people to prove their citizenship in order to be freed from custody.
In a complaint filed in the Southern District of Texas on Friday morning, the group of more than 30 people said that immigration authorities’ current practices violate their rights to due process and protection against unreasonable arrests.
“ICE has ignored constitutional protections and created and encouraged an environment of seize first and sort it out later,” attorney Raed Gonzalez wrote. “Constitutional protections and limits are not even treated as an afterthought; they are ignored, trampled on, and forgotten.”
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the filing. DHS leaders, including Secretary Kristi Noem, have denied that citizens have been detained during ICE operations or said that examples of detained Americans were cases of people trying to interfere with legal arrests.
The complaint was announced during a news conference at the Houston Democratic Party’s Second Ward headquarters. The lawsuit doesn’t seek damages, but instead asks a judge to declare that any policies or practices that require U.S. citizens to carry proof of citizenship are unconstitutional.
The lawsuit claims that ICE has stopped legal citizens while enforcing the White House’s immigration agenda.
In one example, the lawsuit points to a Jan. 9 ICE raid in Donna, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border, where agents jumped a fence and held a man, Humberto Garcia, at gunpoint before tackling him. The agents also allegedly kicked a woman at the home and then entered the house without a judicial warrant to detain even more people, according to the complaint.
The agents were there to arrest Garcia’s noncitizen parents, who were “in the process of obtaining lawful permanent resident status,” the lawsuit acknowledged.
“In the process of doing so, they unnecessarily and improperly harmed and detained three U.S. citizens outside their own family home for hours,” the lawsuit said.
The complaint also includes 21 Houston residents, as well as plaintiffs from Baytown, Pasadena, Jacinto City, Katy and South Houston. The lawsuit doesn’t describe any arrest that happened in Houston or Harris County.
Not all of the people named as plaintiffs were detained or had to prove their citizenship, Gonzalez said.
“No, they have not,” Gonzalez said. “There’s a large group of people that are just concerned ‘I’m going to be next. This is going to happen to me.’ A line needs to be drawn.”
[…]
The complaint appears to challenge parts of controversial Supreme Court decision that allowed federal agents to conduct wide-ranging immigration arrests in Los Angeles last year
The court, in a 6-3 vote in September, reversed a California federal judge’s order that barred agents from stopping people based solely on their race, language, job or location
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that a person’s “apparent ethnicity,” speaking with an accent or presence at places like a bus stop or car wash could contribute to an agent’s reasonable suspicion that a person is in the country illegally.
Critics decried Kavanaugh’s decision, saying it paved the way to allow police to use racial profiling to make arrests.
The new lawsuit includes passages from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the same decision. The court’s decision “improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely,” Sotomayor said.
The lawsuit joins other complaints alleging immigration agents are disregarding civil rights in communities across the country.
More plaintiffs may join the suit as it progresses. I don’t know what the odds in general are would be of challenging a Supreme Court precedent like that – it’s not an entire ruling, but one of the stated justifications for a ruling – but Kavanugh himself has tried to walk these words back in more recent opinions, so perhaps this is as good an opportunity as one could expect. One of the demands Democrats have made in the current fight over DHS funding is for “an explicit prohibition that DHS cannot detain or deport American citizens”, so there’s more than one way to get to this. One way or the other, it needs to happen.
I remember that during Sotomayor’s SCOTUS confirmation hearing, her past comments about the value of having the perspective of “a wise Latina”’ on the court generated a lot of teeth gnashing and pearl clutching on the right. But she’s been proven right; the type of privileged cluelessness represented by people like Kavanaugh, who will never have to worry about ICE snatching HIS children, or violating HIS 4A or 5A rights, is a major contributing factor to our current mess. Racial profiling is wrong, period, and has no place in any society that claims respect for equal treatment under the law.
I am absolutely not above indulging in some schadenfreude over Brett’s discomfort over the term “Kavanaugh stop.” You earned that legacy fair and square dude.