02.24.26
Blows against the Empire
Yesterday, former ICE attorney Ryan Schwank testified before a forum chaired by Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal and California Representative Robert Garcia. It was the latest in a series Congressional Democrats have been holding on the gross abuses being committed by the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem, at the bidding of Stephen Himmler Miller.
“On my first day, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant,” said Schwank. This is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition of illegal search and seizure, without which no one can feel secure in their own homes. Schwank, who was asked to join ICE in 2021 for his experience in law enforcement oversight, resigned on Feb. 13 after being assigned to teach cadets the law at the agency’s academy in Georgia. That is, teach cadets to disobey the law.
Schwank testified that among the 240 hours cut from 584-hour program were those covering “the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, use of force, lawful arrest, proper detention, and the limits of officers authority.” Eliminated are “all legal instructions regarding the use of force” and what is means to be “objectively reasonable, the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force.”
He continued: “Without reform, ICE will graduate thousands of new officers who do not know their constitutional duty, do not know the limits of their authority, and who do not have the training to recognize an unlawful order.”
He did not mention that Jonathan Ross, who fatally shot Renee Good, was an ICE veteran who had received all the proper training.
Anyhow, ICE is denying everything Schwank said, in spite of the supporting documentation he submitted.
Last week, another Constitution-respecting member of the legal community spoke truth to the abusers of power.
U.S. District Court Judge Joseph R. Goodwin, in West Virginia, wrote a searing opinion in the case of Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos, a Salvadoran national who has been in the U.S. for years, with a pending asylum case, a work permit, and a valid driver’s license. Like thousands of other law-abiding immigrants, Urquilla-Ramos was stopped in his car, without cause, by masked men who said they were ICE agents, arrested, and summarily detained. A court stayed his removal from the district and scheduled a hearing the next month for the government to explain why it had—in defiance of earlier court orders—arrested and detained Urquilla-Ramos.
But before the hearing the government sent him to detention in Texas, and then to Washington State. When he was finally returned to West Virginia and locked up, he brought a writ of habeas corpus before Goodwin’s court.
In the first sentences of the 34-page opinion, which quotes Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln and likens ICE agents’ masks to those of the Ku Klux Klan, Goodwin gets right to the point:
Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.
[. . .]
In our constitutional republic, governmental force derives its authority from the Constitution. But that authority is not unlimited. The Government’s power is legitimate only because it is derived from the People and exercised through law by identifiable public officers answerable to the public and to the courts. The structure of the Constitution guarantees visibility. Both the officer and the force he employs are traceable to authority delegated by the People and subject to the limits imposed by law. When the Government uses force against the public, the citizen can recognize the officer as a lawful representative. The public can evaluate the act. The judiciary can later review it. Every stop, arrest, detention, and use of force can be tested against the Constitution’s protections. Not so here.
Judge Goodwin immediately granted Urquilla-Ramos’s release from custody. But his case was hardly a one-off. The New York Times counted 35 cases in which federal judges held hearings for the government to explain why it should not be penalized for violating court orders regarding illegal arrest and detention of immigrants.
Finally, while the White House threatens to suspend TSA PreCheck if DHS is not funded — preferring to make U.S. citizens suffer rather than rein in its goons — the Dems are holding the line, refusing to approve DHS’s budget without what they’re calling “commonsense reforms” to the conduct and oversight of ICE and border patrol agents. The shutdown continues.
There are rumors that Noem may try to evade the ignominy of forced resignation or impeachment by trying to run for Senate in South Dakota by challenging incumbent Republican Senator Mike Rounds. It would be hard to decide which of these two people is less awful —though Rounds may have the moral advantage of not being accessory to several murders.