The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

Under the old processes, they would get detained, and then they would go through what’s called processing—they might have their biometrics done, there might be an interview with an officer to confirm information that they have in the system, and after that conversation, they would then be put in a holding area for a few hours, and then put into one of the county jails in Minnesota. Most of the time the person’s stay for detention would be either in Minnesota or around the Midwest.

One of the big departures in current practice from what it was in the past was that ICE’s logistical acumen has reached the point of arresting someone at, let’s say, 9:00 in the morning and having them on a plane by noon. It was working like clockwork. People were not going through that longer process I described. They were going very, very quickly, and they could find themselves suddenly in El Paso or New Mexico, most often in Texas because the detention capacity in Texas has grown a lot.

Now, let’s assume this is a client of yours. Even if you knew they were at the Bishop Whipple building, there was no easy way to contact them. If you went online to the detainee locator, a lot of the time it would say the person is in custody, but it would not tell you where they were. It would direct you to call ICE at this number. Of course I’ve done this, I’ve called the number, and nobody ever picks up. It’s just a dead number. So then you have no idea at all what’s going on, but you do know how quickly they have put people on an actual plane out of the country, and have done so even when they legally should not be able to.

On top of that, we have a Trump administration that says that even if they know that it was a mistake, they don’t have to correct that mistake. Once a person is no longer in U.S. custody, they say this is a foreign-power problem, and they don’t have any means to fix it if they are out of the country.

Minnesotans Just Won a Huge Court Victory Against ICE