Trump's ICE Goons Keep Breaking The Law; Why Aren't They Being Prosecuted?
One is reluctant to call them cowards, but is there any other plausible explanation at this point?
Last month, for the scholarly journal Nonprofit Quarterly, I wrote an article with a simple premise.
A simple premise.
Even though the Supreme Court has ruled President Trump effectively immune from prosecution, even when he breaks the law, this same ruling does not automatically extend to his goons. For this reason, the idea of prosecuting them for violating citizens’ rights was entertained for the piece by a number of experts. These included Trevor W. Morrison, dean emeritus of New York University School of Law (as well as coauthor of a Yale Law Journal article titled “What Kind of Immunity? Federal Officers, State Criminal Law, and the Supremacy Clause”); Jodi Short, a professor of law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco; and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (an outspoken liberal on immigration issues for his two terms).
At the time I wrote that article, the Trump administration had already sent hundreds of people to a concentration camp in El Salvador without due process. Perhaps the most infamous case was that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the administration admitted was here legally and had been sent to El Salvador because of a clerical error. Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has committed many more atrocities. In Oklahoma City, ICE raided a house where they thought undocumented immigrants were staying but which was in fact occupied by a family of lifelong US citizens. Instead of apologizing for their error and leaving, the group of 20 armed men allegedly confiscated the family’s entire life savings, phones and laptops. They also allegedly ordered the mother and her daughters outside of the home and into the rain before they could put on clothes.
“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” the woman in the house said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”
(Here is their GoFundMe fundraiser.)
On the other side of the country, ICE arrested the mayor of New Jersey’s largest city — Ras Baraka of Newark — and is menacing three of New Jersey’s elected legislators, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver. Coleman, Menendez and McIver were present for a congressional oversight visit. Baraka visited the detention facility because he claims ICE is operating within Newark’s Delaney Hall despite lacking permits. He also pointed out they have not allowed city inspectors to enter. Perhaps this is why he was repeatedly denied access to the facility in his own city, and then told he had committed “criminal trespass” for standing on public property near the facility.
This can’t be legal, can it?
The short answer is: No, it isn’t legal.
“It's certainly not legal,” O’Malley - who served as mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007 - said. “When police steal from drug dealers, that's not legal,” so it definitely is not legal when they do so from legal citizens not even accused of a crime, much less convicted of anything. “In the name of going after people that they deemed to be less than human and less than citizens, all of us are vulnerable to these crimes, whether it's in this case theft or something even worse, like illegal detention. We're all vulnerable when there's no due process for those that claim to have an extralegal right to apprehend.”
The long answer to the legality question — which I learned as I reached out to the offices of many of the prosecutors with jurisdiction over these cases — is: Many of these prosecutors are too scared to act.
“I don't understand it either,” O’Malley said. “Given that we were raised in a republic of laws, our reflex is to immediately assume that the federal government cannot be sued by the states, that there's somehow legitimacy in the exercise in this case of the detentions of people without due process.” Yet even though public lawyers are correct in stating that the federal government can’t be sued if acting under its authority, they are only telling half the story when they give that response.
“What is not true is that when the federal government acts beyond its authority — when they kidnap other human beings, shave their heads and ship them off to concentration camps and without due process, as the judges have said was the case of the gentleman from Maryland [Kilmar Abrego Garcia] — that the federal government can still act however it wants,” O’Malley added. “Just because the Supreme Court and Department of Justice say the sitting president can't be prosecuted, that doesn't mean that if he were to order somebody to kidnapped or to be illegally murdered, that the people he orders can't and shouldn't be prosecuted. That makes no sense.”
If you spoke to the local prosecutor willing to press the case, “certainly they would have a claim of malicious prosecution.”
The bottom line?
Unless these prosecutors grow a spine, America seems poised to slide into authoritarianism… and without so much as a whimper of meaningful pushback.
“If you look at the history of authoritarian regimes — whether it's in Germany or whether it was in Argentina — it starts subtly and they start by going after those for whom they the broader public will have little sympathy, and then it expands from there,” O’Malley said. “Throughout all of this white nationalist authoritarian co-presidency, there is a very clear disdain for people that they believe do not pass the purity test of being ‘true Americans.’”
Trump and his goons are targeting the most vulnerable among us, such as immigrants, to start. But that will not be where they stop.
“They know they can't do that with white people immediately, so they start where they start,” O’Malley said. “This is why it's so important that attorneys general and state's attorneys and district attorneys start filing charges against those that in excess of their authority and contrary to the law confiscate property from, kidnap and/or jail people without probable cause or due process.”
Back Seat Socialism
Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.
Twitter (X) @MatthewWRozsa