Inside ICE: Immigration Law, Constitutionality, and the Impact on Our Communities

Episode Notes

Transcript

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

We saw a case in Massachusetts of a student who was arrested because she had written a particular kind of op-ed in the school newspaper who was surrounded by mass ages and put into an unmarked black SUV and queried away. I mean, this does cause a lot of fear.

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Welcome to the award-winning podcast, lawyer to lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer to Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams, coming to you from Southern California. I used to write a blog May Please the court, and I have three books out entitled to How to Get Sued the Sled and my newest book. How would You Decide 10 famous trials that Changed History? You can find all three on Amazon. In addition, our new podcast miniseries in Dispute, 10 famous trials that changed history is currently featured here on a legal talk network and on your favorite podcasting app. Please listen and subscribe. Well, the actions of the US immigrations and customs enforcement that are known as ICE have divided the country. Many believe that President Trump’s administration’s cracked down on illegal immigration and violent crime is making the country safer. On the other side, there’s been a resistance across the US with communities standing up to ICE’s intimidating tactics, which include anything from unmarked vehicles, masks, concealing ice agents’ identities to arrests, outside courtrooms, and even in schools together with lack of due process.

These actions have led to controversy and significant legal challenges in response to ICE’s actions, Steven Miller, white House Deputy Chief of Staff has claimed that federal agents carrying out arrests and deportations are immune from federal prosecution and otherwise have federal immunity. So do ISIS actions go too far or is ICE making our country a safer place to live? And are these ICE raid protected and legal today on Lawyer to Lawyer? We’ll Spotlight Ice? We’ll take a look at the legalities behind the actions of ice, the constitutionality of ICE raids, lack of due process and the impact that ICE is having on the people of the United States. So without further ado, we’re joined by our very special guest, Daniel Kanstroom, professor of Law faculty director of the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy, and Dean’s distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School. Dan also founded the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic and co-founded BC Law School’s Immigration Spring Break Service trips together with his students. Strom has won many high profile immigration and asylum cases and provided counsel for hundreds of clients over many years. Dan also created the post deportation human rights project to conceptualize and develop a new field of law while representing US deportees abroad and undertaking empirical studies of the effects of deportation on families and communities. Welcome to the show, Dan.

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Dan, we were talking about last names before the program got started and all of us to some degree I do myself, have immigrant names. How did you get interested in immigration and the law?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Well, actually my interest in immigration goes back to my paternal grandmother. I happened to have spent a lot of time with her. She was a refugee from what is now Ukraine around the turn of the 20th century. She came with seven brothers and sisters fleeing bazaar and various things that were going on in Russia at the time, and she always talked to me about that immigrant experience. She actually worked with a group that was called the Emma Lazarus Group that was named after the person who had written the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, and she worked with immigrants and really taught me a lot about caring about the immigrant experience, both as a matter of helping people who needed help and also as a matter of building a culture in this country, a welcoming culture. And I always respected that work.

I think that’s what set me in that direction in the first place. When I went to law school, I actually thought I was going to do more labor law or various types of civil rights law, but I became aware at that time, this was in the 1980s, that immigration law was a very fascinating venue for the most compelling types of questions about civil rights and human rights. It’s an area of law that’s been essential to the development of the country. John Kennedy wrote that book, A Nation of Immigrants. So people have a generally positive view of it, although it is quite complicated from a Native American Indian perspective or from the perspective of various other aspects of US history. But I always felt like it was interesting, but then when I learned about the law, I just became fascinated because so much of immigration law is so outside of the constitutional norms that we take for granted in other arenas, and it just seemed like it was really a frontier for civil rights and human rights.

And it’s the kind of thing that once you get into it and you start meeting people from all different countries and representing them, speaking different languages and learning about the various pathways that people take, you get sort of addicted to it. And that’s what happened to me, and I practiced it for some years and then started teaching it, and I found that it’s a really interesting subject to research as well as a compelling subject to practice. Part of that is because the deck is stacked against people often in immigration proceedings. And this is not only true in the Trump administration, it’s been true for a long time. So when you can win an immigration case, you typically feel quite good about it. So I’ve stuck with it for many years for those reasons and others that we can talk about.

J. Craig Williams:

And immigration is one of those things as a lawyer that you either practice and you practice completely or you don’t practice in that area. Isn’t that right?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Yeah, I think that’s a good point. There’s been a lot of good work that’s been done by pro bono lawyers, particularly at large firms, but not only there. And there’s been work that’s increasingly being done by public defenders and people who are specialists in family law or criminal law. But as a general proposition, I normally say to people, this is not something you want to dabble in unless you’re well-trained and supervised because it really is full of traps for the unwary. There was one court that described it as an area where morsels of comprehension must be pride from mollusks of jargon. It’s really hard to just go in and read the statute and figure these things out. And in part that’s because some of the doctrines go back to the Alien and Sedition Act period or even before that. And there are specific legal precedents that are cited by government attorneys to this day that derive from the period of Chinese exclusion and deportation.

And beyond that, as I say, it’s very technical. It’s an issue because it’s an area in which we really need more lawyers. I mean, having a lawyer makes a huge difference in the outcome of a case, and yet even in the sort of regular formal immigration court hearings, I think it’s less than 30%, maybe 30 to 40% of most of the people who are represented by counsel and the outcomes are really different. So I try to encourage lawyers to do it, but I also encourage people to get trained, get mentor, get supervised, work with a good quality NGO, and make sure you get some help.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, that is the question I guess that I wanted to ask is it seems at this point that if there is going to be pro bono efforts, it should be directed toward this particular area. But as a lawyer, I know that I don’t understand immigration at all. Where would I go to get this kind of training? You said an NGO. What kind of organizations do I want to look at?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Well, I know in the New York area, they’re using an immigrant corps actually of paid lawyers. There’s a lot of the legal aid offices have lawyers, but there are also a lot of NGOs around the country. We have one here in Boston that’s called a payer project that does asylum cases and specifically matches lawyers who are interested with a mentor to whom they can turn when they have a technical question. And the success rate in those cases is quite high. So you have to look around in the various parts of the country. There’s a lot of Catholic legal services, Lutheran Legal Services. There’s a thing here in Boston called the Brazilian Immigrant Center and the Irish Immigrant Center. So some of them are kind of ethnic-based groups. I think it’s important to ask around and make sure that you find one that does good quality work because unfortunately, there’s also a lot of bad practice in immigration law and you don’t really want to be associating yourself with that.

There’s also a lot of unauthorized practice of law by notarios and people who often mislead clients, but in general, particularly around the major cities, happy to say that there’s a lot of really good quality non-governmental organizations, nonprofits, the A CLU affiliates do very high quality legal work. The National Lawyers Guild has something called the National Immigration Project, and there are a number of organizations in Washington dc, the American Immigration Council, for example, that publish good data and materials and can refer you to places where you can get trained or can volunteer. Most bar associations would be a good entry point to find ways to help.

J. Craig Williams:

And we have here one in Orange County, the UCI law school has an immigration clinic, is another great place to look at universities.

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Absolutely. I know that clinic and also most of the law schools in California have very high quality clinics. Not all of them are looking for volunteer assistance, but normally they can tell a practicing lawyer, if you want to do something, here are some good organizations you can connect to.

J. Craig Williams:

Great. Thanks very much. At this time, let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer to Lawyer. I’m joined by Professor Daniel Kanstroom,. He’s founder of the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Let’s kind of dive into some of these general technicalities of things, the way things work. Let’s talk about ice, what kind of legal authority they have, where does their authority come from and what are the constitutionality of the raids that we’re seeing?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Well, first of all, ICE is a, I mean, it’s not that recent anymore, but it’s a relatively recent creation that came about in the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attack in New York. Prior to that, it was the immigration and naturalization service. One of the big differences is that ICE exists within the Department of Homeland Security, whereas the former INS, there’s still a lot of practicing lawyers who think it’s the INS that does immigration enforcement, but that agency doesn’t really exist anymore. It was split into a number of sub components. So ICE exists within the Department of Homeland Security, but much of the authority that was given by statute to the former INS has been transferred to ice. So basically, ICE agents are tasked with internal immigration enforcement and the statute does lay out what their powers are supposed to be under the law. We may get to the question of warrants and so forth, but basically ICE agents are empowered to make warrantless arrests under certain circumstances.

They can briefly detain people for questioning if they have a reasonable suspicion, and that’s supposed to be based on specific articulable facts that the person is a quote alien. That term alien is actually, I think of it as a pejorative term, but it is in the statute, so I’ll just read it illegally in the United States. So ice agents are now fanned out all over the country. They have a huge budget, the so-called one big beautiful bill allocated, I think it was around 170 billion for border and interior enforcement. They’re recruiting a lot of agents and they can get warrants, they can do factory raids, workplace raids, but they can also stop people on the street. Although, as I said, the law does limit it to cases where they have a reasonable suspicion. And of course, the big question has been about their tactics recently, which have gotten much more brutal than they had ever been in the past or at least more aggressive.

And there have been questions about arresting people based solely on, for example, apparent ethnicity and the Supreme Court in a very summary order with a concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh really being the only explanation has sort of allowed that to continue. Although it is pretty clear that it can’t be based just on ethnicity, but if you combine ethnicity with speaking Spanish or standing outside of a Home Depot, these are the issues that are being litigated. Now. What are the outer bounds of the authority of ICE to detain people briefly. Now, if they have a warrant, they can’t arrest people, and it should say that part of the complexity of immigration law is that we have many millions of people in this country in a variety of legal statuses who could be subject to enforcement, but the methods of enforcement should vary according to the law. So if you have, for example, a person with a green card who’s convicted of a crime, that person could face a deportation hearing, but that would be a formal hearing in front of an immigration judge in an immigration court.

On the other hand, we have a lot of people who have been brought in to what are called parole statuses during the Biden administration, which has been summarily revoked by the second Trump administration. And this Trump administration is arguing that those people are subject to something called expedited removal, which is a very fast track proceeding where you basically don’t get to see a judge. You can’t even file a habeas corpus petition ostensibly, if you have a credible fear of persecution, you can get in front of an immigration judge. But often in practice, these things are very summary, and then of course you have people who are undocumented and if they can’t prove that they’ve been here for more than two years, two years or longer, they too are subject to expedited removal. So a lot of the arrests that we’re seeing now are targeting people who probably are not going to see a formal hearing in front of an immigration judge.

Once they get arrested, they’re going to be detained and they will probably be put on a fast track to expedited removal. The estimate so far this year is that there have been about 500,000 or more deportations. It’s a little difficult to know exactly how many of those have been expedited removals, but it’s a very large number. That law was actually created in 1996, but it has been expanded a lot during the Trump administration throughout the country. So there’s been a lot of expansions of ice authority during this administration in that way and in some other ways.

J. Craig Williams:

I want to ask a combined question that kind of focuses on two points in prior administrations. Have the deportation numbers been higher, lower, and what’s going on with the difference in the tactics in terms of masks and aggressiveness and publicity and so forth?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Yeah, that’s a very interesting question, and I think you have to kind of separate out what we would call formal deportations. That is in immigration courts after proceedings in front of a judge, and those are kind of due process governed hearings. So there were rules, there’s a transcript, there’s an attorney who would represent the government. There’s an attorney who would possibly represent the non-partisan, although they don’t have a right to an appointed counsel in most places. But the other track are these informal proceedings. Some people refer to them as shadow deportations, and a lot of those historically were very informal and would take place at or near mostly the southern border. If you total up all of those things, it’s been averaging probably I think around a million or more per year for quite some time. And in terms of the formal deportations, the numbers were very high during the Obama administration.

So enforcement priorities sometimes move from the border to the interior. Sometimes they move During the Obama administration, they said they were going to focus on their phrase was felons, not families. During the George W. Bush administration, there was an emphasis on a few high profile workplace raids. For example, there was a meat packing plant in Iowa that was a very well-known raid. There was a big raid in New Bedford, Massachusetts, mostly Guatemalan workers who were actually stitching leather bags in part for the military, if I remember correctly. So the numbers are actually not that unusual now as compared to past episodes. But the force of it, the intensity of it, the nature of the sort of intimidation, the push by the sending out of notices to people that they should self deport, it is kind of a rising tide. And I think if current trends continue, the numbers will exceed what was done in past administrations.

But it is certainly not the case. I mean, COVID is a bit of a separate case. So let’s bracket that for the moment during the Biden administration. But if you go back to the Obama administration, there were a lot of deportations, but they weren’t as many of the sort of fast track and the raids. They were more focusing on people who had committed crimes, which actually was what candidate Trump had said he was going to do. But the facts are right now that a very small percentage of the people who are actually being arrested and detained and removed have any kind of criminal involvement at all. The reason for that is that non-citizens are actually quite a bit less likely than citizens to commit crimes. So this has been a longstanding debate in the field, and the consensus among sociologists and demographers and lawyers has been that all this talk of criminal aliens is a bit misplaced.

I mean, there certainly are. Some are some gangs, there are some drug issues and so forth. But for many years it’s been the case that to the extent there was a criminal problem in this country, it was more a problem of the children of citizens than it was the children of non-citizens or of non-citizens themselves. And I should say that even the administration statistics now are a bit misleading because they’re counting immigration violations, like crossing the border without authorization is technically a federal misdemeanor. But does that render a person, a criminal alien in the sense that that term is being deployed politically? I would say not.

J. Craig Williams:

What’s the legality of the ice agents

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Covering their faces? I mean, I’ve never seen that before. And they’re saying that it’s for their own protection, and I put that in air quotes because they say they’re being docs or followed or whatever. There are some rising challenges to this, but part of the tricky part of it is that there really are no federal regulations of which I’m aware that govern this clearly. So states and municipalities are saying there are rules against wearing masks and so forth. So I think this is going to be something that we’re seeing more litigated and that is very unusual. I personally have never seen that before, and I’ve studied episodes of deportation raids in this country, going back to the alien and sedition acts and the Palmer raids in the early 20th century and so forth. We’ve never seen anything like this, and it’s clearly causing a lot of concern and a lot of chaos and a lot of fear in non-citizen communities, particularly when you combine it with the very vague standards that ice agents may use to pull somebody aside and arrest them.

We’ve seen documented cases now of more than 150 by the last count, US citizens who have been mistakenly detained by ice. There’s a lot of cases of people who say, I have papers, but I left them in the locker, and then they can’t get them seeing these fast track removals. Suddenly somebody ends up in a third country that they have no connection to. So all of these things are part of the kind of intentional, I think, creation of fear in this particular episode. And I think the masks are a big part of that. I mean, you have to wonder, federal agents who would go after mafia people or cartels in criminal court typically did not wear masks. So I’m not sure why subtly this has become necessary for ice agents, and it is certainly a scary thing to witness. I mean, we saw a case in Massachusetts of a student who was arrested because she had written a particular kind of op-ed in the school newspaper who was surrounded by masked agents and put into an unmarked black SUV and scurried away. I mean, this does cause a lot of fear.

J. Craig Williams:

It certainly does, and I think as you mentioned, it’s in intentional and I think the intention is intimidation and fear cruelty to the point of it, it seems we have ice in courthouses, we have ice in schools, we have states that are trying to seek protections. What’s the prospect of say California saying you can’t wear masks and you can’t treat people like this?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

First of all, I would say about schools and churches and so forth, that is a particular change because up until quite recently, there were guidelines in the Department of Homeland Security and in DOJ that instructed basically against rating those kind of places, protected spaces they were called, I think technically. And in the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, they removed that and said, we’re going to leave it up to the discretion of the agent in the field. So that is part of that agenda of fear and there being no safe space in terms of what states and localities can do. Now you get into a kind of tricky set of technical legal questions involving the supremacy clause and federal enforcement, A lot of the outer boundaries of what a state can do, have it not fully been tested yet, I think they will be, again, as the pressure increases, the pressure on states and municipalities to respond increases.

Actually, we saw similar tensions a long time ago in Massachusetts around the enforcement of fugitive slave laws where there was local resistance to federal slave catchers coming into Massachusetts. So there certainly is a history here where I live of some resistance to this, but I think this administration is already gearing up to after sanctuary cities so-called, which is not a technical legal category because there’s a wide variation of what sanctuary cities means. But I know there’s going to be a struggle over that. And the frontline of that struggle right now as you’re certainly experiencing in California and people are experiencing in Chicago, is the use of National Guard and other military troops to backstop ice, to supplement what ICE is doing, to basically intimidate state and local actors from resisting in any way. So it’s quite tricky to figure out what can state and local officials do as a matter of law against these kind of practices. But I know a lot of people are thinking about that.

J. Craig Williams:

And let’s take another quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to lawyer to lawyer. I’m back with Professor Dan Krumm. He is founder of the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Let’s take this conversation to the street. I mean, let’s get down there and see. I’m standing as a citizen in the street. I see an ice raid right in front of me, and my wife asked this question earlier today, what can we do to protect the children as part of this, but what as a citizen can I do and what can’t I do?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Well, certainly you cannot interfere physically. I always would counsel strenuously against that. That violates a variety of federal laws interfering with a federal agent in the course of their duty. And perhaps we can talk a little bit as we go forward about what possible types of liability there might be if ice agents are exceeding their authority and being especially brutal. I think taking pictures of things is allowed in most jurisdictions, videos, taking notes, trying to get some information, encouraging people to know what their rights are. For example, if a person is in their home or in a school or a workplace, a private space, they should not open the door. They should ask to see if there is actually a warrant because there still are some protections against ice agents coming into protected spaces. But if it’s a street encounter, it’s very difficult because the standard is very low.

As I said, all the ice agent needs is a reasonable suspicion, and the ICE agents know in fact that even if they exceed that, they stop somebody who should not be stopped. The likelihood that that is ever going to be suppressed in court is very low. The likelihood that they’re ever going to be called to account for doing anything improper is very low. So it is extremely difficult to say what people can do if they see something happening on the street. I would also urge people to be careful about this because sometimes you think what’s happening, but you may not. So I think in general, documenting things is probably the best that a bystander can do. The more important thing would be supporting non-citizen communities in as many other ways as we can by empowering them, by trying to create pathways for representation, by helping them understand what rights they have, which conceitedly are not especially robust, but they’re not nothing. And then acting politically in solidarity with those communities, perhaps giving food to people, helping offer to take care of children, things that are sort of behind the scenes are probably the best approach.

J. Craig Williams:

Can ICE take an immigrant parent and leave a child standing on the street?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

They can. I mean, sometimes they take the child, and again, they’re doing things in such a often a ham-handed way that you get reports of ice just kidnapped a child, and sometimes the ice agents think, well, we’re supposed to be taking care of this child. Now, again, in prior administrations, things were much better organized and there were special agencies that were taking care of children, and it would be transparent and you’d know who to call. But the chaos right now is just terrifying. Everybody. No, of course you should not abandon a child on the street. Probably the better practice would be for ice agents to call a local social worker or maybe the local police and somebody should take care of that child.

J. Craig Williams:

You mentioned that there’s been 150 or so. I think ProPublica says there’s about 170 US citizens held by immigration agents. Some have filed suit. What are your thoughts about that? Is this David versus Goliath and they’re never going to stand a chance?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

I mean, this is again, not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen this before. There were a number of US citizens who were wrongly deported. There’s one famous case of a young man who was wrongly deported to Tijuana. Part of it is once they figure out if the person is a US citizen, they will of course have to release that person. But if the person is actually formally deported, then they might have to use some legal process to get hold of a passport. I mean, part of the problem here is that people don’t come with their legal status stamped on their foreheads. And actually, there’s a lot of US citizens in this country who can’t prove that they’re US citizens. People who were born to, for example, midwives may not have proper birth certificates. A lot of people don’t carry passports. Most of us are not accustomed to carrying papers around wherever we go.

And so this is a very difficult situation. Now, if ICE does actually wrongly arrest a US citizen, there is a theoretical possibility that that citizen could have a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act. But those cases are very difficult to bring, but it is possible. And ICE agents are trained to release US citizens if they do catch them. But the fact that we’re seeing these numbers of people being swept up indicates I think how chaotic this enforcement regime has become, and frankly, how careless a lot of these agents have become. They’re under enormous pressure too, to generate numbers. That’s always a dangerous thing with policing. If you are wrongfully detained as a citizen, what are you supposed to do? Well, you can file a habeas corpus petition if you have a lawyer, if somebody knows where you are. But again, the problem is if you are wrongfully thought to be subject to expedited removal and you can’t convince the agent that you are in fact a US citizen, yeah, you may find yourself in a foreign country that’s unusual, but it’s not unheard

J. Craig Williams:

Of. So you’re doing a yeoman’s job at BC and you’ve won many high profile immigration and asylum cases and provided hundreds of clients with counsel over many, many years. What are you doing now?

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Mostly, I’m trying to get the word out. I’m trying to collaborate with the great organizations that are taking a lead on a lot of this litigation with the ACL U, with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, various groups that we have. I think that what’s happening so far, I think the good news is that the legal system is sort of, in my view, hanging off the edge of a cliff, but the law is still there. The courts are holding, the courts are calling the agencies to account little by little, we’re seeing some protections getting built in. So I’m trying to support all those lawyers out there who are taking all these cases and thinking strategically about what is the best way to at least make sure that due process is an important component of this. I think politically, I’ve been saying to people that Trump won reelection thinking that he was going to create a national conversation about what he called criminal aliens, and that happened for a short period of time. But what’s happening now is he’s created a national conversation about due process and about proportionality and about the importance of being a nation of immigrants and about human rights. So I feel like things are turning and I’m trying to be a part of that turn through the courts.

J. Craig Williams:

Great. Well, Dan, we just about reached the end of our programs. Let’s kind of wrap up and get your final thoughts as well as perhaps your advice to anybody who wants to reach out and get involved.

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

My final thought is that this is a very, very difficult time, and I’ve never seen fear like I’m seeing now in various communities. But I would point out that the United States has seen episodes like this before, and I think if people work together and maintain a good sense of solidarity and a good commitment to the best principles of law, most of us at least can see our way through this. And as you said, I did create once a post deportation project, so I would urge people not to think of deportation as necessarily the end of law either. There could still be accountability for people who were sent to third countries, to prisons in El Salvador, to Africa, all those crazy things that were happening. We just need to stay engaged and focused.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Dan, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you.

Professor Daniel Kanstroom:

Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk with you.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, here are a few of my thoughts about today’s topics. I think that everything that Professor Strom said is exactly correct. Don’t interfere, record, document, and report. This is a dangerous time for everyone involved with these ICE raids, not only for the agents themselves, but for the people that are potentially being deported as well as citizens that are observing and watching what’s going on. And it’s best to let everyone do their jobs and process this legally because that’s what we do as lawyers. And if you want to get involved, I think Dan is exactly correct there. Reach out to a local organization, but learn it first because this is a very complicated area and good luck. Well, that’s it from my rant on today’s topic. Let me know what you think. And if you’d like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcasts, your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit us legal talk network.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal think lawyer to lawyer.

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