So I'm going to say something which is going to make people left of fascism angry at me, but I promise that the longer you listen the angrier you are going to get - at the conservatives and liberals who collaborated on this.
Immigration violations should be criminal charges.
Not because of anything to do with the severity or moral character of immigration. But because deportation involves depriving somebody of the life they have built - sometimes putting them at mortal risk in the country they're deported to, and jt deprives them of their liberty and any property they might have in the country they call home now. The United States has different judicial protections for civil cases and criminal cases. For cases where the state can deprive you of life, liberty, or property, it is supposed to give you a lawyer, a jury of your peers, the right to appeal, all that very important shit.
So immigration should be a criminal charge! Because criminal versus civil offenses are not actually a description of how bad we think a crime is. They are a checkbox which defines whether or not you get legal protections against a hostile state capable of ruining your life.
And part of the ongoing project of increasing anti-immigrant violence in the United States since the DHS was built in 2003 has been twisting the immigration courts into a sadistic and grotesque parody of lawfulness. Exhibit a of which, is the fact that immigration offenses are classified as civil offenses. That was done on purpose, championed by racist conservatives who understood the legal system. Whenever a progressive uses that as a gotcha or to point out hypocrisy, the conservatives you are talking to fall into one of two categories. One of them doesn't give a fuck. The other knows what's up and they are quietly laughing at you.
Because shit is real bad for immigrants in the immigration system. It got especially bad under Obama, then the scope got worse under Trump, then Biden institutionalized and gave the whole nightmare system a jolt of funding in the arm, and now Trump is wielding for ethnic cleansing and you have no idea just how kangaroo court bad shit has gotten because of it.
Immigrants don't get a right to a lawyer. They don't get a right to a jury. They don't even get a right to a real judge - yeah you heard that right, they often get assigned administrative judges instead, which means some bullshit employee of the executive branch who is not a real judge. Border agents can make summary decisions without a trial too. They don't have any right to appeal either. You may sometimes hear about new immigrants appealing their asylum cases, but it's not really a proper appeals process, it's more of double checking that the fake judges or border agents followed procedure with their summary decision - and the DHS almost never decides it was wrong.
Also to be clear how much bullshit goes on in this, hearsay can be legally submitted as evidence in these so-called trials. You and your lawyer, if you have one, might not be allowed to see all the evidence against you. Yeah that's right. Some ice agent can say they overheard somebody in line say they heard a rumor that you weren't really being persecuted in your home country, and not only can that be admitted, you and your lawyer might be forbidden from knowing that's what you have to contest. For a case that will decide your whole life. Literally, and ICE agent goes up to the fake judge who is also employed by the DHS, whispers in their ear, and then the judge asks you - who definitely does not have a lawyer - if you have any defense against the accusation leveled against you. Which you did not hear and have not been told. And then they deport you.
And the core legal principle upon which this rests is the fact that immigration is a civil offense.
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