Police can and will steal from you every chance they get. It’s called civil asset forfeiture. Being a legal citizen is no protection, being 100% law-abiding is also no protection. Cops need no due process or judge or anything to take all of your property. It’s on you to prove to a judge’s satisfaction that that property wasn’t used in a crime or bought with the proceeds of a crime. Guilty until proven innocent. Hope your lawyer works for free, since, you know, the cops took all your money and property.
I thought we got this all cleared up eight years ago.
So someone who entered illegally is no committing a crime by working? Only the employer is?
Unless they commit document fraud to gain employment?
Could they be complicit in conspiracy to commit unlawful employment of aliens if they and the employer both know they are not legally entitled to work?
An act doesn’t have to criminal to be illegal. It doesn’t matter whether the law is criminal, civil, or administrative, it’s still illegal.
So…you’re saying someone’s immigration status is irrelevant to whether the government can steal your stuff?
They need a pretext. A person driving down the road with a substantial amount of money - well, drug dealers do that too. “Nice people don’t carry $1,000 cash”. However, they can’t walk into the bank and take your account (yet) unless they can show the money came from crime. Ditto, your car or house. However, if you are working illegally, then the car, house, and bank account - and the big screen TV - are proceeds of crime, obviously.
Having it in hand, ie. seized from your pocket or car, is a lot easier than having to go into a bank and demand they turn over the money. they need a good piece of paper for that. Some states too, police have a pay terminal to drain prepaid credit cards right there during the traffic stop. (“Prepaid card? Crooks use that to launder money”)
(In the Philadelphia instance - they stop and frisk; “you have no job, how do you happen to have $100 in your pocket? Must be proceeds of crime, drug sale or fencing something. Fell free to hire a lawyer and try to get it back…”)
There are two precedents aside from civil asset forfeiture, though:
Interning American citizens without procedure for their ancestry (during WWII) - what happened to their belongings?
Freezing bank accounts of Iranian nationals in the US during the hostage crisis, was not lifted.
Here http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-realistic-ways-donald-trump-can-accomplish-his-crazy-goals/ is an article (skip the first two) which gives the laws that Trump can use for a muslim ban and seizing Money to build his wall.
As for how to identify the bank accounts of illegals, probably anybody who sent Money to mexico.
Just as an aside, please tell your friend to tell his idiot brother to get a lawyer and fix this asap. He needs to think about his kids and wife not just his idiot self.
If he entered the US legally he has a lot of options he needs to explore.
So, like getting a parking ticket justifies calling a person an ‘illegal’?
I don’t want to argue this at length, again, and here, since it’s not the subject of the OP and it has long been established in countless other threads, but the term ‘illegal’ applied to an immigrant is intended to be pejorative and isn’t in any way an accurate description of their situation in the immigration system.
I don’t want to argue this at length, again, and here, since it’s not the subject of the OP and it has long been established in countless other threads , but the term “illegal” applied to an illegal immigrant is intended to be a colloquialism and is not in any way intended to be a micro-agression
Should I Use the Term “Illegal Immigrant”?
Why ‘illegal immigrant’ is a slur
‘No human being is illegal’: linguists argue against mislabeling of immigrants
The Dehumanizing History Of The Words We’ve Used To Describe Immigrants
Immigration Debate: The Problem with the Word Illegal
The battle over the words used to describe migrants
The bottom line is the term is considered pejorative to those it applies to and many others and that is reason enough to consider it so. Especially once people started doing the tell-tale shortening of the term from ‘illegal immigrants’ to ‘illegals’.
There are plenty of people who argue otherwise but they’re wrong. Once the term has been used pejoritavely by many, and it has been explained it is offensive to a large group of people, those who continue to use it are doing so deliberately despite this. That’s why people don’t use “oriental” to describe people anymore either, along with many other examples.