ICE releases letter claiming they do not need a warrant for arrests - are Gestapo comparisons valid?

Great Debates
1

So this letter from the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency probably won’t have the intended effect.

There’s a lot there, but the relevant part for this thread is this:

ICE does not need a warrant to make an arrest

ICE officers are sworn federal law enforcement officers who operate within the confines of the law. Section 287 of the Immigration and Nationality Act provides ICE officers the authority to arrest aliens without a judicial warrant. In fact, no judge in this country has the authority to issue a warrant for a civil immigration violation. Congress, by statute, vested this authorization solely to supervisory immigration officers. Local police officers don’t need a warrant when they encounter someone breaking the law in a public space, and the same holds true for ICE officers. Obstructing or otherwise interfering with an ICE arrest is a crime, and anyone involved may be subject to prosecution under federal law. In addition, encouraging others to interfere or attempt to obstruct an arrest is extremely reckless and places all parties in jeopardy

This is actually news to me. I was under the impression that arresting people was one of those things you generally needed a warrant for. This is especially disturbing given stories like this one, where a US citizen was detained for almost a month by ICE (and lost 26 pounds in that time, putting the lie to another claim in the ICE letter, that “ICE officers treat detainees with dignity and respect”).

I am not the first person to draw parallels between ICE and the secret police of various authoritarian regimes. Indeed, I remember a time when “Papers, Please” was basically artistic shorthand for those kinds of regimes. But hearing that no warrant is necessary, especially when getting a US citizen out of an ICE detention center was so difficult even with the relevant papers, makes this a lot scarier.

And then of course there was the recent news that ICE was running training exercises for “Urban Combat”, taken from a document that they failed to censor correctly. It’s intended to be hyper-realistic, which, as a reporter from the guardian explains:

"Hyper-Realistic is defined as ‘such a high degree of fidelity in the replication of battlefield conditions in the training environment that participants so willingly suspend disbelief that they become totally immersed and eventually stress inoculated.’”

So - just to be clear on where we are on this.

We have a government organization that is willing and able to scoop up citizens and non-citizens alike without warrants and apparently with little to no due process (one citizen was held for upwards of 3 years), throw them in concentration camps in squalid, horrific conditions where the administration actively lobbies to deny children things like soap and toothpaste and will not vaccinate them against infectious diseases. Oh, and they’re super racist.

In fact, there’s quite a lot of really weird nazi symbology going on, and The Atlantic wrote a cover story back in 2018 about how Trump had radicalized the organization, which you can read here.

But ultimately, the lack of oversight and due process should disturb everyone. The way they joke about the death of migrants in their care should disturb everyone. The calls for hyperrealistic urban combat simulations should disturb everyone. The concentration camps, the state they’re in, and the fact that Trump is pushing to detain people there indefinitely should disturb everyone.

Really, the thread title talks about comparisons to the Gestapo, but to the degree that they’re necessary, it is only to shake people awake. What ICE is doing is horrible all on its own. The ability they have to ruin any given person’s life with little to no oversight is terrifying. But, as usual, we kinda need to keep an eye on another question - how much worse can it get? I think it’s no exaggeration to see ICE as a prototype for a fascist secret police force. And that’s the kind of thing that can and does get really really bad.

2

It is certainly true that people can be detained without a warrant if caught committing a crime. When that leagally becomes an arrest, I’m not sure.

The problem I see is not necessarily the “arrest” but the apparent lack of habeas corpus to remove the person from custody.

3

In that case, try getting out of your car and assaulting a cop the next time you’re pulled over for a traffic violation, then demanding to be released because the officer didn’t have a warrant.

Really, just drop the Gestapo/Nazi comparisons. They’re grievously insulting to the memory of actual victims of the Nazis, and their descendants. The modern situations they’re applied to almost never come close to what actually happened under Adolph and his merry band of psychotics.

4

Yes, the OP is operating under a misapprehension about arrest warrants. The police don’t generally need a warrant to arrest someone they find committing an offence. They can arrest right away, provided a statute gives them that authority.

Gestapo comparisons are decidedly unhelpful. But hey, if you want to make it easy for people to dismiss your concerns by over-egging the pudding, go ahead.

5

Sounds like you didn’t have a good understanding of the laws and rules we’ve been operating under for a very long time now. If that misunderstanding is the basis for your yet-another-Nazi-comparison, it seems especially easy to dismiss as the nonsense that it is.

ETA: Ninja’d

6

If ICE can’t arrest someone for, say, walking in the area of a US border carrying a bunch of belongings and being unable to produce any ID or proof of citizenship, then what’s the point of ICE agents? Do you expect them to stand there and get a bench warrant?

I think the trouble comes in when being in a southern border city and having brown skin becomes a pretense for targeted harassment. That’s certainly an ongoing issue that has been debated, judiciated, and subjected to policy changes. But that’s unrelated to the ability for ICE agents to arrest people on suspicion of violating immigration law without a warrant.

7

Given that the domestic terrorist organization Antifa has recently decided they think it’s cool to attack ICE facilities, I think training exercises for “Urban Combat” are probably a reasonable part of their agents’ training.

8

The problem here is that you can’t observe someone being an illegal alien. So a warrant is required for an arrest on that basis.

9

No, this is false. ICE agents can detain someone upon reasonable suspicion, and arrest them upon probable cause.

My understanding is that since immigration is a civil matter, the determination of probable cause is not required to be judicially reviewed either, and that the process can be conducted by ICE as determined by the legislature. That’s from memory, so I could be wrong on that one.

10

What is a reasonable suspicion that someone is an illegal alien? Tell me about these observable characteristics of an illegal alien that distinguish them from citizens and legal aliens. The justice system may ignore the fiction in your kind of reasoning but that doesn’t address the issue in the OP.

11

I’d say observing someone who is climbing a border fence, or observed entering the country outside of a controlled access point would meet the criteria of reasonable suspicion.

12

You’ve observed the crime of entering the country illegally. That isn’t the same as arresting people on a ‘suspicion’ that they are an illegal alien. Can you prove you are a citizen if an ICE agent grabs you? Isn’t that the claim they use for arrests all the time? It’s always easy to wave away unjust laws on the basis that they’re only getting the bad guys, until they turn that law on you.

13

Ding ding ding. I would hope that it is understood that the exception is when a crime is obviously in progress, and that I didn’t need to spell that out for a bunch of people who should damn well know better. Yes, if I assault a cop and he sees it, then obviously there is a clear and present reason to detain me. You don’t need an arrest warrant for a crime in progress. However, if a cop sees me and has a vague hunch I was the dude involved in a bank robbery somewhere some time ago, I hope you’d all agree that said cop should get a warrant before arresting me.

So how does ICE establish that there is a “crime in progress”? Taking it from that LA Times piece above:

After he was moved to a privately run immigration detention center 85 miles outside Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert, Carrillo’s hope that ICE would quickly remedy its mistake gave way to a sense of despair.

“Inmates were telling me, ‘You’re not going to see a judge for weeks. In here, you don’t have any rights,’” he said. “I started getting real scared: How long was I going to be in here? How could this be happening?”

It was not until Carrillo’s fourth day in detention, when an attorney intervened and presented agents with Carrillo’s passport, that ICE corrected its error. Carrillo emerged from custody to find his phone filled with messages from angry clients. Several fired him.

The dude’s a US citizen. They just snatched him up from a car park and took him to a detention center, and had his lawyer not intervened, nobody can tell how long he would have been stuck there. The article goes on to note:

Similarly, in three dozen false arrest lawsuits, Americans caught in the ICE dragnet alleged that officers took them into custody on the basis of cursory computer searches. The agents, according to the lawsuits, often overlooked evidence of citizenship, such as passports, and failed to examine paper files or conduct interviews to confirm the accuracy of their database searches.

Emphasis mine. Again, this is an organization that can take you off the streets and make you disappear with little to no oversight, and they do not require a warrant to do so. They make a lot of serious mistakes, are extremely racist, and some people who are definitely US citizens have lost years of their lives fighting this. If you do not see this as a problem, then I have no idea what could possibly wake you from your stupor. Like, here’s another case.

Um… I mean… That’s kinda how that kid who was a US citizen got detained for 21 days. He was coming back from visiting mexico. He even had papers on him! It’s just that they didn’t trust that they were real because he also had a mexican visa on him that had bad information.

But of course, the vast majority of cases I’m talking about aren’t “people near the border who look like they’re crossing illegally”. It’s “worker in west virginia taken into custody and them dumped halfway across the country” or “hairdresser in Iowa taken into custody because ICE had bad intel”. Again, to quote the LA Times article:

31 out of 77! Nearly half the people this guy booked were citizens or lawful residents! That’s insane! This guy, by the way, was operating in Rhode Island. Lots of fence-jumping going on there. :rolleyes:

Have things gotten better since then? Maybe, but then you get cases like this:

That’s recent. He got out in 2018.

Again, if you’re not concerned about this, I don’t get why not. I’m honestly lost what it would take to shake some of you people, what it would take to say, “Hang on, this government body having this kind of uninterrupted power is probably a bad thing.”

14

No. Apprehending an illegal is considered the same as an arrest “on view”. An officer does not need a warrant to arrest someone that the officer sees committing a crime.

And you and they are totally wrong.

15

I take particular issue with this line of argument. The reason we “never forget” in the first place is that remembering what happened is a good way to stop it from happening again. If the steps society took towards fascism in the past are some holy, untouchable relic of the past where any comparison is insulting, then what’s even the point of remembering it to begin with? Just forget the lesson; you’re certainly not going to be using it any time soon. :rolleyes: And then when we get concentration camps that aren’t as bad as back then (yet), and a police force that can arrest people for spurious reasons who are closely identified with the president’s party that aren’t as bad as back then (yet), we can just lean back and assume that we don’t need to worry, and things certainly can’t get worse… yet.

I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to the Jews against ICE protests, but… newsflash. They sure as hell don’t think these comparisons are “insulting”. :mad:

16

You may be speaking about how you wish the law to be, but I’m talking about what the law actually is. If someone is observed doing the things I described, they can certainly be detained and arrested.

If arrested on suspicion of being in the country illegally, the burden is on the person being arrested to demonstrate they are here legally. That determination can’t be made by ICE agents in the field, but it is done after an arrest at an immigration hearing determination (there’s a word for this that escapes me).

17

But now you’re creating an unenforceable standard. To obtain a warrant, a peace officer has to swear an information or similar document, setting out the basis for the officer’s reasonable and probable cause that X has infringed the law and should be arrested.

But if you say there’s no way for an ICE officer to articulate why there are reasonable grounds to believe X has committed a breach of immigration laws, then there is no way, in your analysis, for a warrant to issue.

18

As stated above: that’s an absurd standard, because picking out any individual as “illegal” happens to be pretty hit-or-miss. It’s one thing if you’re at a border checkpoint, it’s entirely another if you’re minding your own business in your home in… Well, literally anywhere in the country, come to think of it.

But hey, not like people involved with border patrol have any notable biases that would make this scarier, right?

Just kidding, of course they do!

Shit, I now regret putting so much work into the OP, since basically nobody seems to have read it.

19

Maybe try leaving the Nazi comparisons out of your next one. You wrote:

If you really believe that ICE having the gall to arrest people without a warrant is “horrible all on its own”, then do what I advised once and leave the Nazis out of it.

20

I was unaware that there existed a singular organization of that name, and am curious how the organization you refer to announced its decision. Would you please link the press release, meeting minutes, or whatever other facts led you to make this claim? Thanks.