Last month, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings, who found the government violated the agreement, ordered the release of more than 600 immigrants on bond, which the appeals court paused. Roughly 450 remain in custody, attorneys say.
In the 2-1 opinion, the appeals court said Cummings overstepped his authority on the blanket release of the detainees without assessing each case individually. The consent decree “carefully maps out what the district judge can or cannot order” to balance enforcement and public safety, according to the opinion. But the ruling also said the Trump administration wrongly categorized all immigrant arrestees as subject to mandatory detention.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys said they were disheartened by the ruling but glad the court upheld the extension of the agreement, which among other things requires ICE to show documentation for each arrest it makes. Federal judges elsewhere including in Colorado have also ruled to limit warrantless arrests.
If I squint up my eyes a certain way, I can kind of see the logic. Maybe a handful of these people actually are guilty of some kind of violent crime (definitely they are in the propaganda telling of what is happening with all these warrantless arrests). So it’s hard to say that every single person needs to go free no questions asked. I personally think basically 100% of these people are random innocent people who Trump is unleashing this concentration-camp hell on for literally no reason relevant to them at all, but I’m just trying to grasp what the logic is, and if I really try, I guess I can see it.
However:
If the cops search the car without proper procedure in place, and they find a body in the trunk, and then they arrest the driver and question him without a Miranda warning and he says “Oh yeah I killed that guy,” the case can get tossed. The dude can walk even though he clearly killed someone. That’s the way it has to be. You can say “Yes but that’s not right,” but that’s how it’s set up, and for good reason. If we can let that guy go free, we can sure as shit let a few hundred innocent people out because anyone guilty who happened to get snatched up too got their rights violated when they got snatched.
It’s literally the proverb about “better 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to prison,” just with the proportions reversed in the worse direction.
Thing is they aren’t “going free”, they are being released on bail before their court hearing. Otherwise I think you’ve got it right.
Well, but if you’re buying the Trump people’s crazy counterfactual that 100% of these people are all these Willie Hortons running around ready to murder some suburbanite because they weren’t in custody, then it kind of would make sense sometimes to keep them in. Even if they’re scheduled for court at a later date and maybe to get deported or something at that time.
I know that isn’t actually true, I’m just saying that even if it were true, the law is set up to let dangerous people go back into society sometimes, if the cops are breaking the rules about how they’re supposed to handle them, and that it’s a good thing that things are set up that way.