TEXAS JUDGE PUSHES U.S.
TOWARD 'SANCTUARY NATION,' WARNS SCHOLAR, 'Unless
the courts are reined in, they will create a de facto policy', by Paul Bremmer,
6/17/17, WND
Are sanctuary cities becoming the
law of the land in America? At least one analyst thinks so after a federal
judge in Texas ruled that the Bexar County sheriff violated the constitutional
rights of a Mexican citizen by holding him in jail on an immigration detainer
after his criminal charges were dismissed.
The Bexar County Jail regularly
honors ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) detainers, which are requests
that local jails hold detainees who are set to be released for an extra 48
hours if the detainees are suspected of being in the country illegally. The 48-hour period gives ICE agents
time to get to the jail and apprehend any criminal aliens before they are
released back onto the streets.
However, Judge Orlando Garcia of San
Antonio ruled the sheriff’s office does not have probable cause to hold onto
aliens who are not suspected of any crime – other than the crime of illegal
entry. He ruled the sheriff violated the plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment right to
protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
Daniel Horowitz, senior editor at
Conservative Review, reacted in horror to what he saw as another example
of “judicial amnesty.” “Once again, the courts have
conflated criminal law with immigration law,” Horowitz wrote. “Nobody has the
‘right’ to break into our country, unilaterally assert jurisdiction, and then
be allowed to disappear into the population without detention just because
there is no probable cause of another crime.
“The courts are now essentially
granting judicial amnesty to anyone not accused of another crime outside of
illegal entry. This decision will likely impact many other sheriff’s
departments that want to comply with ICE detainer requests.”
Horowitz, author of “Stolen
Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges From Transforming America,” said sanctuary cities are old news at this point. “There might be 375 jurisdictions
that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, but unless the
courts are reined in, they will create a de facto sanctuary nation policy by
preventing even cooperative states and localities from following the law,” he
declared.
Dan Cadman, a fellow at the Center
for Immigration Studies, was more circumspect in his analysis of Garcia’s
ruling, but he admitted the decision will hinder ICE’s ability to secure
cooperation from local jursidictions. “It’s going to really thoroughly
complicate things, and it probably makes life right now pretty miserable for
county sheriffs and police officers in the state of Texas as well, given the
anti-sanctuary statute,” Cadman told WND. “Everybody is going to be scratching
their heads trying to figure out what the limits of cooperation are so they can
all go forward.”
He was referring to SB 4, Texas’ new
anti-sanctuary city law that Gov. Greg Abbott signed in May. The statute, which
is not scheduled to take effect until Sept. 1, creates penalties for
jurisdictions that fail to honor ICE detainer requests and prevent their law
enforcement officers from inquiring about immigration status.
Several jurisdictions have filed
lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the statute, and Garcia is
scheduled to hear the cases later this month.
Cadman said Texas should absolutely
be allowed to compel county jails to honor ICE detainers. “If anybody has the
ability to dictate the terms and circumstances under which police officers and
sheriffs operate, it’s the state, which issues the statutes that give them the
basis of being law enforcement officers in the first place,” he said. “And
Texas, it’s worth noting of course, like other border states, has a serious
problem. And Texas is aware of it, and Texas knows that there aren’t enough
federal officers to do their job without fundamental cooperation; and that’s to
the detriment of the state itself.”
According to the Houston
Chronicle, Garcia claimed “because
immigration violations for the most part are civil matters that don’t incur
criminal penalties, the sheriff’s office does not have probable cause to hold
them [if they don’t commit an additional crime]”.
The judge wrote: In short, the
county’s assumption that probable cause must exist to detain any individual for
whom it receives an ICE detainer request was unreasonable. Its routine
detention of such individuals made it inevitable that it would engage in
warrantless detention of individuals who were not suspected of any criminal
offense, but who became the subjects of ICE detainer requests either because
they fell within a noncriminal … enforcement priority or because a detainer
request was lodged despite their nonpriority status.
Cadman thinks the judge may be a bit
confused.
“The judge seems to conflate
criminal and civil cases by somehow suggesting that there is a different Fourth
Amendment and probable cause standard, and I don’t necessarily know that I
agree with that,” Cadman said. “My sense is that the judge is probably not
hugely familiar with immigration law, how it works, and the fact that
frequently immigration law, even though it’s ‘civil,’ very closely tracks the
way criminal law works, and that’s deliberate.”
Horowitz, for his part, pointed out
other lower-court judges have also required there be probable cause of a crime
other than an immigration violation in order for a detainer to be honored. For
example, a district judge in Illinois last year voided thousands of detainers
and ruled ICE must obtain a warrant for each individual and prove the suspected
alien is a flight risk.
Horowitz believes Congress must
strip the courts of jurisdiction over immigration. “It’s time to face a
stone-cold truth: If we are going to continue perpetuating this myth that the
unelected federal judiciary has supreme and exclusive jurisdiction over every
major social and political question, and is the sole and final arbiter of
constitutional interpretation (including the very ability of a nation to remain
sovereign and control its own future and the orientation of its own society),
we have already lost the war for this country,” he concluded.
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