Hi lawyer. I’m really confused by all the things happening here in minneapolis. I’ve seen so many reports of illegal and unconstitutional actions. Do you think these agents will ever face accountability?
I saw a video from a few days ago of a minneapolis-based immigration lawyer listing all the illegal actions. She’s outside the whipple building, the epicenter for rounding up and sending away humans.
I’m a teacher in minneapolis and i’m so scared of what is happening to my students, their families, and our community. People are going missing, being denied their rights, and children are facing so much trauma and harm. It feels like this will never end.
I want to “do” something, and yet I’m scared and hopeless and just want to keep showing up for my students.
It’s a hard time to be a teacher. I imagine it’s a hard time to be a lawyer, too.
I'm going to start this out with the bad.
There are some hard truths that I think Americans are only starting to realize, which are: their constitutional protections are, at this point, deeply degraded. Since the 1980s, the pro-police and anti-drug propaganda have enabled politicians and courts at every level to take away unthinkable levels of rights.
In law school, you learn that the protection against search and seizure by police is more exceptions than rules. Police can use vague facts, insinuations, "a reliable informant told me," information they don't even know but that some other police officer told them, and more to get a search warrant. They can search or arrest any time of the day or night -- except under new restrictions, and even then a magistrate or judge can grant an exception. One such exception I saw was "drugs are easy to destroy and they tend to get used, so we need to go in at midnight right now in order to make sure we find the drugs." Which any thinking person can tell: if granted, essentially creates a universal exception on the business-hours warrant rule for drugs. You can be stopped and groped by police officers. You can be forced to give your identification. Police can come in for exigent circumstances. Cars are basically a complete and utter exception to the warrant requirement of the 4th Amendment in traffic stops.
Right against self-incrimination? It used to be a "balancing test" weighing whether the person did actually feel and should have reasonably felt that they were being compelled to talk. Now it's one question. Was the defendant read their Miranda Rights? However, I guarantee you, if you are not a lawyer there are some aspects of those rights that you have misunderstood and gotten wrong. That's not the question, though. It's not "did you understand your real rights?" It is: "did you sign the Miranda waiver?"
Speedy trial? Forget about it. On a federal, constitutional level, a "speedy" trial means probably several years down the line.
The whole Bill of Rights has been unfathomably degraded for the last forty years. There's not much left.
On top of that, you never did really have a right to be well-treated while in custody. I'm not being pithy, it's just a fact. Every day in every state in this country, people are arrested, left in solitary cells with nothing but a concrete slab and a drain and a nonfunctioning toilet and an overhead florescent light that you can't turn off. There probably isn't a nurse available at night. There might be a doctor available when they swing by once every two weeks. Arrestees are endless lines of "bodies" cuffed and making loud rude noises and guards stop caring. They won't remember who you are. Everyone's drunk or sick or in pain, just shut up. The guard can't do anything about it except ping someone to contact Medical when they get there, or call an ambulance, which requires that two of their already reduced staff go with the inmate to the hospital where they then have to wait for hours or days, during which time they will be unavailable for jail duties.
This is all normal.
This is all regular, normal stuff that happens every single day. This is not the exception. It's not the badly run jails. It's not the private jails. It's the rule.
And it's okay, according to the courts, because it would be too hard to fix all the little bits.
(Don't even fucking get me started on the case law on this. There's cases that are still valid law where prison guards did stuff like yell "don't drink after that guy, he's got AIDs" and then laugh amongst each other while the inmate whose medical information just got revealed got the shit kicked out of them. But, you see, there is no constitutional right to medical privacy, prisons deserve our deference, and the reasonable prison guard might not have known that they had to keep it a secret, so, by qualified immunity, the door was slammed on that particular lawsuit.)
Every day I hear of people getting their heads slammed on concrete and their arms broken and wrists sprained and I see the bruises from the cuffs. Every day. You just have to keep going. It can't wound you enough to stop.
2020 was a relief because people were listening!! They were listening, for a second!! And you could physically see the momentum drop after that. 2021, still listening. 2022, bored. 2023, done.
So, listen. Take all of this that I've just said. Add to it the rush of an unmeetable quota and a bunch of trigger happy fuckheads, and then cause the mass exodus of all experienced, even remotely ethical, non-fuckhead ICE officers who are Not Doing This. Then plop it all down in a place where there aren't clean, ventilated, and well-equipped buildings, no, there's nothing. There's worse than nothing. There's people who are active bad actors trying to sabotage anyone stopping them, AND there's no backup for anyone trying to do it right.
No kidding there are people in cells having seizures! That's happening to my client in the jail just down the road! Except in Minnesota, they don't have a protocol for what hospital to call! No wonder there are people who are kept in cages with too many of them to lay down. They were never equipped for this, and there are people who think inflicting the cruelty is the right punishment for standing up against law enforcement.
Nothing about Minnesota has shocked me except for the beauty and grace offered between neighbors and friends. The community coming together in the face of this. You are wonderful. You are the only reason anything might change. You clogged them up with fights they couldn't win and you did it holding a whistle and facing down a row of guns. You're so brave! You're so beautiful!
Every student's hand you hold, every time you give them time on an assignment or make sure they can access it without getting out on the street and coming to school: these are the acts of grace that are making a difference. When you go pick up a friend who was arrested and you use their phone to photograph all their injuries and you take them to a doctor. When you hug a scared child. When you let your students walk out and demonstrate.
You're perfect right where you are. You are what the world needs. You all moved the fucking needle.
What protects this dismal state of affairs is the feeling that criminals are "others" who need to go "away." People don't care what happens to criminals unless it becomes their family. Same with immigrants. Minnesota said, those are my neighbors. You inspire me.
The odds are against accountability. I've got hope.
