Use discretion is too broad to be meaningful. Discretion is always available. I’m asking if this person should have been allowed to remain in the US forever, essentially negating the law. As he repeatedly violated the law, should the taxpayer be responsible for his care for the rest of his life?
The law was certainly followed in this case as it had been working in the court system since 2005, according to the above linked article.
What? I answered your question. You asked “I am assuming you disagree with the law that says those legal immigrants who commit certain crimes may be subject to deportation. If that’s accurate, when do you think this law should not apply, or should it not apply ever?”
I answered “I think government should have the duty to use judgement in circumstances like this in which such deportation is an effective death sentence, and find a different solution. This was a monstrous action, and the law is not a moral defense of such monstrosity.”
I thought that was a direct answer. If you need more clarity, here goes – I think deportation is appropriate in some circumstances, but deportation of a homeless mentally ill diabetic to a third-world, devastated country he’s never been and in which he does not speak the language, is utterly monstrous, and thus government should have the duty to use judgement in circumstances like this in which such deportation is an effective death sentence, and find a different solution. This was a monstrous action, and the law is not a moral defense of such monstrosity.
What part of that do you disagree with? Do you have no problem with deporting a mentally ill homeless diabetic to a devastated third-world country in which he’s never been to and does not speak the language?
He was homeless and mentally ill. I believe the state has some duty of care towards mentally ill people with no ability to take care of themselves. Even mentally ill migrants. I don’t believe mentally ill people should be effectively sentenced to terrible suffering and death because of their immigration status. This doesn’t necessarily require keeping him the US at taxpayer expense, but it does preclude deportation of a diabetic to a devastated country in which he has no ties or ability to survive.
Do you disagree?
That’s no defense of monstrosity. I believe this was a monstrous action, since it resulted in forseeable incredible suffering and death to a mentally ill homeless person. Do you agree or disagree that this was a morally monstrous action?
With the knowledge that this man was diabetic and mentally ill, and of course IANAL, I think this deportation very easily qualified as “cruel and unusual punishment”. If so, it actually violated the law.
In this particular case he very clearly should not have been deported to Iraq. The only remotely sensible options would be to give him the same punishment we give to US citizens who committed those crimes, or to deport him to his actual home country. If his actual home country is unlikely to be able to be able to ensure that he gets medical care when he arrives, he doesn’t need to be deported.
You are taking it as a given that the law has to be applied the exact same in all circumstances, which is in fact not how immigration law works (or the majority of criminal law).
When you say “duty to use judgment”, it implies you believe judgment wasn’t used. It was. It came to a different conclusion than you. I think what you mean is that this action should be forbidden. Right? Because that’s a much less passive way of saying what you are trying to say, if I’m interpreting you correctly.
Because then the law needs to be changed, and include all of the various escape clauses you approve of. Without that, then you must accept that judgment will be used and at times it will be done in a way you disagree with.
This person was deported to a country that accepted him. If anything, the receiving country was then responsible for his care.
The federal appellate court disagrees with you.
Let us not even pretend that it was believed by those who ejected him that he would be cared after by the country they sent him to. If an accused spousal abuser says that he wants his wife to come back home, should the authorities send her back and, if so, who is then responsible for what happens next?
Obviously I’m arguing that the law should be changed. If any judgment was used, it came to the wrong conclusion. But what do you think? Do you think this was morally wrong? Do you think this should be a lesson that leads to change? If not, then that’s the source of our disagreement – I think this was a great moral wrong, and you don’t, and there’s no point into getting into details when you already are fine with what occurred. If you agree with me that this is very wrong, then we can get into the details of what lessons we should learn, and how we can prevent this from happening again.
If you feel that stealing change from cars should warrant the death penalty, then just advocate for that. Be clear and direct.
Stealing change doesn’t result in the death penalty, nor should it. Since this isn’t what happened, it seems like a non sequitur to fixate on this irrelevancy.
Which groups of people do you think the law shouldn’t apply to?
I’ve gone into some detail about how I feel, answering your questions. Why won’t you tell us how you feel? What’s the point in going into details about our feelings on the law if you’re not willing to tell us your feelings about this at all? Do you have a problem, morally, with what occurred, or do you think this was morally appropriate? If you have a problem with it, do you think the law should be changed?
You keep assuming that critics of this “deportation” (which was in fact not a deportation) need to have a single standard that applies to all people in all situations. You use people’s opposition to this assumption as a grounds to dismiss their arguments. However you haven’t in fact defended it, which is odd since it flies in the face of how the actual American justice system works.
I don’t consider the issue a moral one. It’s not a great outcome and if the law were to change to require folks that have been in country for some requisite amount of time to be immune from deportation I’d be fine with that.
Anytime there is a law, there will be circumstances where application seems inappropriate.
To some the ends justify the means.
So here’s the point of our disagreement. Thanks for sharing. Those of us who think this is a moral issue will advocate change, and criticize both the current law and its application.
And I expect your position is the dominant one, at least among comfortable American citizens. This isn’t something that has much of a chance of affecting our lives.
And when you find circumstances where the application of the law seems inappropriate, then that is an impetus to change the law.
Do you think that stealing change should result in the authorities putting a human in a situation where a reasonable person would expect that death would be a likely consequence? This sounds like indifference to human life to me.
What do you even do with that? 
I don’t know how anyone can do these things and live with themselves. But “rules are rules” arguments are very powerful. “I don’t make the law, I just enforce it.” Of course, everyone has a duty not to participate in the enforcement of certain laws. If they didn’t, then the “just following orders” defense to genocide would be valid, and there would be nothing wrong with participating in the building of a totalitarian nightmare-state. I think one big problem with cops and soldiers is that they launder their morality and fail to exercise the basic responsibility of asking whether what they are doing is humane.
But even that lets them off the hook too much. Take the wheelchairs. There is no law saying that cops have to destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair. That’s a matter of pure discretion. Even if you’re told to conduct “Operation Clean Sweep,” nobody is going to object to you allowing the disabled to roll away rather than, as depicted in a tragic photo from the scene, stagger away painfully. What could possibly cause police to act this way?
I don’t know, there’s just a kind of “authoritarian mentality” that many of them seem to develop, where they think “the law” means “barking orders at people and then punishing them mercilessly if they don’t comply to the letter.” Look at that poor guy who got murdered at the La Quinta in Arizona. The officer kept shouting instructions at him and confusing him, and then when he made an unexpected movement the officer filled him with bullets. The cop was acquitted at court, then given early retirement and a pension.
Bone has his excuse not to care. “The law says”. That this application of the law led to atrocity is of secondary concern, because it’s the law. Indeed, we’re the ones who are being unreasonable by expecting that the government not send a homeless schizophrenic with diabetes to die in a country he has never lived in, because that’s the law. And if you get a sinking feeling in your gut about that, well, ignore that too - appeals to emotion are a fallacy.
When presented with human suffering, the right-wing thought pattern is to find a reason, any reason, not to care. Again and again and again. And if you look, you can find an excuse for any atrocity. The more you excuse, the easier it gets to excuse the next one, until you are excusing separating children from their families by blaming their parents for committing a misdemeanor decades ago. “It’s the law”, see. How much harder could it be to justify the gulags? The killing fields? The gas chambers?
I hope it’s not too much of a stretch to see why I am viscerally sickened by this. Or why I expect most other people would be as well. It shouldn’t take a lawyer or a constitutional amendment to understand that sending a sick, mentally ill man off to die is fucking wrong.
I wonder how many Jim Crow and segregation supporters didn’t “consider the issue a moral one”. I wonder how many of those who glossed over Abu Ghraib, or supported waterboarding and other torture methods didn’t “consider the issue a moral one”. Dick Cheney probably didn’t.
I wonder how many slave-owners, and camp guards and Nazi functionaries, and the peons of Pol Pot, etc. Not considering issues that result in avoidable terrible suffering and death as “a moral issue” is certainly an approach with a long, long history. Hopefully we can learn from that history.