If immigration officials continued to refuse entry to passengers according to the Trump travel ban, exactly who would be the individuals who could be held in contempt of court? And who would arrest them? And what if those officers refused to arrest? How far up or down the chain of command does the compliance responsibility lie?
It is my understanding that every immigration officer has the discretion to admit or deny or detain any arriving passenger for any reason, regardless of papers, visa, etc.
This is something of a rare scenario … looking back at the Watergate affair most of the issues were negotiated as to avoid contempt of court charges … and most all the court orders were fulfilled … so I’m speculating here …
So, if the customs official at Logan Airport looks at someone’s Syrian passport and sees the US visa … and them sends them back stating that “the EO says too, fuck the Ninth Circuit” … obviously the customs officer is breaking the law and could be arrested for contempt of court … the manager will see this and quickly rectify the matter and bring the Syrian in … thus covering his own ass …
If an arrest warrant is issued … then this customs officer can be arrested by any LO … he gets pulled over by a Hyannis traffic cop and this warrant shows up on the police officer’s computer … then he would arrest the customs officer and ship him to the appropriate jurisdiction (San Francisco, Seattle, is forcing him to eat tofu unconstitutional?) …
Everybody is required to comply with the court order … from the customs official all the way up to The Donald Hisself … failing that, or LO refusing to arrest, what we have is a complete breakdown of the Rule of Law … some manner of chaos and mayhem would happen … again, it’s never happened before so it would be difficult to forecast …
Immigration officials have quite a bit of discretion, but they do not have complete discretion … there are a few things written into the actual law that is prohibited … for example using ethnicity to refuse entry … a customs officer can’t refuse entry because the individual is an ethnic Syrian …
Nixon could have been prosecuted after he resigned … there were still some court orders he didn’t comply with … but he was pardoned by Pres. Ford … however, there were still several key officials that were prosecuted and they did spend time in jail … though I can’t remember offhand whether contempt of court were included in the charges …