District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s blistering July 11 order, which the administration has appealed, lays out the frightening details of a government that has turned hard-won American freedoms inside out.
In this country, unlike most others in the world, the people are free to go about their business without having to show their papers to government agents on demand, absent probable cause to believe they have committed a crime, or at least sufficient suspicion to ask them questions. Those same agents, by contrast, must identify themselves, and not merely by brandishing their guns. They must be clearly distinguishable in action and appearance from crooks of the sort who kidnap residents of third-world countries. Here there is no army of secret police. There are no roving bands of quasi-military thugs.
Until now. Border Patrol and ICE agents in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties, and now in Sacramento, hide their faces, tint their car windows, remove their license plates, cover their badges, ignore requests for identification, and target people based on where they work and how they look.
If this conduct is allowed to stand for federal officers, based on the specious argument that they need protection, it is inevitable that all police, perhaps all jailers, prosecutors and judges, will soon hide their faces and do their government work in secret.
Agents recognize no sanctuary in the Fourth Amendment’s protection against warrantless search and seizure. They demand at gunpoint that you show your papers and lock you up if they find them unsatisfactory. Frimpong’s order describes a U.S. citizen showing a driver’s license — and then being grabbed anyway after an agent demanded to see a passport.
Since when do American citizens have to carry passports?
There is no sanctuary in the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection or in generations of civil rights struggles, court rulings and policy updates that supposedly swept away racially disparate treatment. Frimpong’s order describes a stop in which agents let a white person walk away but not a nonwhite person. Border “czar” Tom Homan said recently that ICE agents were free to stop people based on their appearance.
There is no sanctuary in the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel. The order describes shocking conditions in the basement of the immigration building at 300 N. Los Angeles Street, where captured suspects were so cramped they could not sit or lie down and had no access to lawyers for days.
There is no sanctuary in courthouses, churches, nursing homes or other places where agents grab people without judicial warrants. There is no sanctuary in essential work, such as farm fields, despite President Trump’s statement that perhaps farmworkers and hotel workers might get a break, because after all, farmers would not hire any murderers. He did not explain why the exemption should cover farmworkers but not, say, kitchen workers.
There is no sanctuary, no protection from deportation, even in American citizenship. The Department of Justice is stepping up a program to denaturalize people who were born elsewhere but lawfully go through the citizenship process and take the oath, but who later commit crimes. Such a move creates a second, lesser tier of citizenship, with different standards of conduct and different consequences for the same crimes.
Second-tier citizenship was virtually abolished in American society after a century-long post-slavery struggle for equality. Must we countenance its return?
But there is no sanctuary even in being born here. The administration is moving to end birthright citizenship, which long has been an unassailable cornerstone of American identity and civil rights. Our leaders are threatening to, for the first time in 60 years, award or deny fundamental rights based not on who you are or what you do, but who your parents were and what they did.
So where can sanctuary be found? If not in lines written on the base of the Statue of Liberty, or in the Constitution, or in citizenship or in simple human decency, then where?
Is there sanctuary only in skin color? If you’re white, or perhaps if you’re Black, you may be OK. If you are brown, you’d better carry your passport for the rest of your days, and teach your children to carry theirs too. Stay away from Home Depot. Endure stops and questions. Keep your head down. It is the dream of the white supremacist. It is the achievement of the 2017 Charlottesville rally to “Unite the Right.” It is a state of affairs repugnant to the American creed.
And the only thing, so far, that keeps it from becoming the new American normal is Judge Frimpong’s emergency order.
The government has appealed.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
