Slate - essential read - "A System Designed to Make People Disappear" (real WTF stuff)

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2017/04/ice_detainees_enter_an_unbelievably_cruel_system_designed_to_make_them_disappear.html

I tried to represent an undocumented man rounded up by ICE. I couldn’t even find him.

By Dan Canon

A couple of weeks ago, for the first time ever, I represented an undocumented worker in deportation proceedings. Or rather, I tried to. My attempts to navigate this system were not what I would call successful. Part of this may be due to the fact that, though I have been a practicing attorney for 10 years, this was my first go at immigration law. But another part of it—most of it, I’d venture—is due to the fact that the U.S. immigration system is designed to be opaque, confusing, and inequitable.

Under most circumstances, I would not wade into this kind of thing at all. I’m primarily a civil rights lawyer, and immigration is a highly specialized area of law with a unique set of risks awaiting unwary practitioners. I would not, for example, take someone’s bankruptcy case or file adoption papers. I would refer those to lawyers with experience in those areas. But the crisis of unrepresented detainees is too big and too pressing to leave to the few organizations and individual practitioners with expertise in immigration law. One recent study found that only about 14 percent of detainees have representation. That’s 1 of nearly 300,000 cases in the immigration courts every year.

If I killed someone on the street in broad daylight, I‘d be entitled to an attorney. But those summoned before the immigration courts, including infants who have been brought here by their parents, have no right to counsel. They can hire immigration lawyers, but only if they can pay for them. Most of them can’t, and volunteer lawyers are scarce. So children, parents, and grandparents are locked up for months, sometimes years, waiting for a day in court. When they show up in front of a judge, they do so alone and terrified. Those who don’t speak English are provided an interpreter who tells them what’s being said, but no one is there to tell them what’s really happening.

snip - long and worthwhile - the last paragraphs

I’m going to suggest something I have never suggested to any working person: If you are part of this machine—if you are a guard, an agent, a janitor, or anything in between—quit. Walk off your job. Right now. You’ve got bills to pay? A family to support? I get it. So do the people who come here looking for a better existence. The system you are contributing to is preposterously evil. It separates mothers from their children. It kills innocent people. It exists only to make easy punching bags out of those damned by their circumstances, some of whom have already lived through unspeakable horrors.

For everyone else: If you’ve never thought about your tacit support for this system, start thinking about it. Start resisting it. Start demanding its abolition. A Kafkaesque bureaucracy needs participants, both willing and unwilling. We have the power to dismantle it.

[Rhiannon12866]

1. Good God!

This has to be one of the most disturbing articles I've ever read...

[ProudLib72]

2. Positively Byzantine

The more bureaucratic hurdles and dead ends, the better. Can't make it too easy for anyone trying to go through the system in the proper manner. When will ICE (and tRump) be reported for human rights abuses?

[PatrickforO]

3. Yes, when I hear the term 'clearing the swamp'

it is this particular gestapo-like system I'm thinking about.

Good post. I'm going to share this with lots of friends.

[jesskirablue42]

4. it's not a swamp

It is a natural wetlands filled with life and productivity that they want to pave over and put a parking lot up in it's place, more like. The mega parking lot next to the new coal plant that is fully automated and under no environmental regulations, that is.

Those who only follow orders will not be looked upon kindly by history, on that I know we both can agree. Whether it is people or the land itself, the only thing the current crop of wannabe brownshirts is interested in is power and greed and profit.

[lpbk2713]

5. This is brutal and inhumane.

Even the most brutal native born mass murderer has a better chance
at justice than the average detainee. WTF is wrong with this picture?

[sharedvalues]

6. K&R - how do we reach the system with protests?

[zentrum]

7. The ACLU needs us STAT!

Send money.

Whatever you can.

They are seriously fighting for these people.

[leftieNanner]

8. I have recently learned that someone I know is undocumented

He works seven days a week at two different jobs. I know him from his weekend gig. He works INCREDIBLY hard!! He has a wife and two children. I do not know the immigration status of his wife. I gave him my home address and cell phone number and let him know that if he hears anything through the grapevine that a sweep is coming through the area, he should bring his family to my house and I will do my best to shield him. ICE can't come in to my house without a warrant. I've even thought about parking my car on the street so that he can park his car in my garage to keep it hidden. What the FUCK is going on in this country. If I knew a way to sponsor him to become documented, I would do it in a heartbeat.

This country? I don't recognize it. In such a short time, the US has become a monstrously cruel place.

[iluvtennis]

10. Love that you are supporting him -we all need to open our hearts. Thank you!!

[radical noodle]

9. I wonder if it might be even better

to try to continue to work for them and help from within. Find out names, have legal connections for them, contact their relatives... something. If they quit they will just be replaced and possibly with others even more heartless.

[dembotoz]

15. my thought as well. tho i wonder if the early guards at dachau were as bad as the latter ones....

[NRaleighLiberal]

11. Kicking

[dalton99a]

12. +1

[KingCharlemagne]

13. Your tax dollars at work /sarcasm/ - nt

[Blue_Tires]

14. Canon would be better served starting a campaign to

update and streamline immigration law, which he has a better chance of than just hoping hundreds of thousands federal employees just leave their jobs en masse...