The Constitution & Illegal Immigration
Barack Obama, who was a “constitutional law professor,” claims that the federal judge who ordered the release of a foreigner detained by ICE with his 5-year-old son embodies what “federal courts SHOULD be doing to uphold our constitutional traditions.”
IN FACT, the judge’s ruling perverts the Constitution by ignoring the fact that the detention of illegal immigrants isn’t imprisonment and doesn’t require a judicial warrant because this is a civil process, not a criminal one. Thus, such aliens are released as soon as they leave the U.S., which they are generally free to do whenever they want.
As the Supreme Court ruled in Wong Wing v. United States, the “detention or temporary confinement” of illegal aliens to ensure their “exclusion or expulsion” is “not imprisonment in a legal sense.”
Likewise, the Supreme Court ruled in Bugajewitz v. Adams that “deportation” is not based on the “conviction of crime, nor is the deportation a punishment; it is simply a refusal by the government to harbor persons whom it does not want.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruled in Demore v. Kim that “although the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process in deportation proceedings,” “detention during such proceedings is a constitutionally valid aspect of the process.”
In keeping with those facts:
- the Supreme Court stated in Harisiades v. Shaughnessy that “deportation” has “been consistently classified as a civil, rather than a criminal, procedure.”
- the federal law that governs the “apprehension and detention of aliens” states that an “alien may be arrested and detained pending a decision on whether the alien is to be removed” on a “warrant issued by the Attorney General,” which is not a judicial warrant but an administrative one.
- the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers states, “It is important to keep in mind that the underlying basis for a non-citizen’s removability may be due to some criminal violation, but the removal warrant used by ICE is not a criminal warrant signed by a federal judge.”
