Congress asks Trump administration why it’s detaining Americans
To repeat from Sunday:
It should be lost on no one that Russian President Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer in East Germany, is a big influence on Donald John Trump, convicted felon and corrupt businessman. The Trump administration’s crackdown started with allegedly violent undocumented immigrants. It expanded to visa-holders, work-visa-holders, and green card holders. He’s moved on to American citizens like night follows day.
ProPublica has a report again this morning about that last category:
At least a dozen members of Congress, all Democrats, have written to the Trump administration with pointed questions about constituents and other citizens whom immigration agents have questioned, detained and even held at gunpoint. In one letter, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded a list of every citizen detained during the new administration.
None has received an answer.
Of course not. Even to reply and deny would draw attention to the issue and acknowledge that Congress has oversight authority.
Last month, ProPublica reported:
The government does not release figures on citizens who have been held by immigration authorities. Neither Customs and Border Protection nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles interior immigration enforcement, would provide numbers to ProPublica on how many Americans have been mistakenly detained.
Experts and advocates say that what is clear to them is that Trump’s aggressive immigration policies — such as arrest quotas for enforcement agents — make it likely that more citizens will get caught up in immigration sweeps.
“It’s really everyone — not just noncitizens or undocumented people — who are in danger of having their liberty violated in this kind of mass deportation machinery,” said Cody Wofsy, the deputy director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
[…]
Spanning both Obama administrations, an NPR investigation found, immigration authorities asked local authorities to detain about 700 Americans. Meanwhile, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that immigration authorities asked to hold roughly 600 likely citizens during Trump’s first term. The GAO also found that Trump actually deported about 70 likely citizens.
The cases ProPublica recounts involve, essentially, American citizens detained for not looking “American” in the eyes of ICE: Puerto Ricans, a Mexican-American Trump voter, a Mescalero Apache, and in 2018 a man from Philadelphia thought to be Jamaican. ICE held that last man, Peter Sean Brown, for three weeks.
“As a citizen, you don’t think it is really possible, because that’s everything against what we are raised to believe that our country stands for,” Brown told the press outside a Miami federal courthouse last year. The Southern Poverty Law Center was filing a lawsuit.
Be watchful for Americans being detained at Customs when returning from a trip abroad. With this administration, one might leave for a Caribberan vacation under one set of “rules” only to find that they’ve changed (and not in a good way) by the time you return.
One of my oldest friends looks Latino. He’s not. He’s got some southern Italian in his family history. His father was on the U.S. Olympic teams in 1936 and 1948. But his look has sometimes attracted police attention since his teens. He doesn’t look “American” enough.
From December:
A friend with an Arabic name and look lives in Vermont. Someone asked him once if he ever felt threatened there. Not really, he said. Okay, now and then some a-hole will shout “Go back to where you came from!” His shrugging response is, “You want me to go back to North Dakota?”
Or in the case of Anand Girdharadas, Cleveland.
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