According to the New York Daily News, federal agents conducted the operation in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, where they rang multiple doorbells in an apartment building but later left without taking any illegal aliens into custody. The Wall Street Journal reports that agents were turned away because they showed up without warrants. A similar situation occurred in Harlem, the Journal states. [More]Just when you think you've seen the nadir of law enforcement retardation...
That's probably not what happened, and you should know better than to believe what you read in the press.
ReplyDeleteThere are two types of arrest warrants. An arrest warrant for, say, burglary, is a "criminal" arrest warrant and authorizes the officers serving it to forcibly enter the premises to make the arrest. But deportation is not a criminal punishment, it's an "administrative remedy." So warrants of deportation are "administrative" warrants and as such, they do not authorize the officers serving them to make forcible entry. The only way the serving officers can enter a premises to serve an administrative arrest warrant is with the permission of the resident.
It's highly unlikely that these ICE officers were armed with criminal arrest warrants charging violation of criminal law, e.g., 8 USC 1324 (illegal entry) or 1326 (reentry after deportation). What they had were administrative warrants, and they were unable to convince anyone to open their doors.
Do you think any reporter knows the difference between criminal and administrative arrest warrants?
Never believe anything you read in the press regarding immigration, on either side. They don't know what they're talking about.
And I maintain that's retarded.
ReplyDeleteWhat's retarded? If the aliens are not charged with a criminal offense, a criminal arrest warrant can't issue. And it's a pretty good bet that quite a few of the aliens couldn't be charged with the crime of unlawful entry anyway, since they are "status violators" who overstayed lawful tourist, business, or student visas. There's no criminal statute covering status violation; the only "remedy" is deportation, which is administrative. Ergo, no criminal charge, so no criminal arrest warrant.
ReplyDeleteU.S. Attorneys are very reluctant to file criminal charges on straight-up illegal entrants, since the first offense is only a misdemeanor (all subsequent offenses are felonies), and there are so many that sending them to District Court would overwhelm the system. So they rely on the administrative remedy of deportation, absent any serious aggravating circumstances.
I sort of agree with you that not criminally charging illegal entrants is rewarding their bad behavior, but when you arrest fifty to a hundred illegal entrants a day (easy to do in a big city), sending them to District Court would shut the system down in a week.
So you do what you can, and deportation is what you can do.
And that's retarded.
ReplyDeleteOkay, but my original point was, they didn't "show up without warrants" like the article says. ICE officers on arrest missions to serve warrants of deportation always bring the warrants with them. Unfortunately, administrative warrants don't allow ICE officers to forcibly enter premises to serve them. So the initial press report was wrong. Which leads to my earlier statement that you should never believe anything in the press about immigration. The press doesn't know what they're talking about.
ReplyDelete