When it comes to rights, immigrants are treated like terrorists

By Pilar Marrero, NewsTaco

Ardani Rosales
Ardani Rosales and his son Pablito

Ardani Rosales, a Guatemalan man and father of two citizen children, was held for more than a year in immigration detention in Arizona before being deported last December.

People like Arandi, with no criminal record but with a previous deportation, can be held without bail or a right to a bail hearing because under immigration law their detention is “mandatory.” On the other hand, a criminal defendant is entitled to a bail hearing relatively quickly and those arrested without a warrant are guaranteed swift due process.

Different rules, different standards

This is just one of the many differences between a criminal defendant and an immigration violator. The latter are often worse off because the rules that apply to them are based on different laws and standards, and authorities are allowed to treat them as if they were not on U.S. soil.

“There´s no right to a speedy trial, those are limited to criminal prosecutions,” said Ben Johnson, director of the Immigration Policy Center, an immigration think tank based in Washington. “That’s one reason these immigrants can sit in jail, without a conviction, for a lot longer than anyone charged or suspected with criminal activity.”

No basic rights for immigrant detainees

And yet, immigrants are held in detention centers that are exactly like prisons, or even in real prisons where federal authorities rent space for immigrant detentions. As the immigration laws have become more punitive in the past two decades, thousands of people languish in immigration jail for long periods of time, particularly because there are long backlogs that delay cases.

Because deportation is considered a civil mechanism, immigrants in the process don’t get the same constitutional rights. For example, they don’t have the right to a public defender paid by the government if they are indigent and can pay one themselves. The protections against illegally obtained evidence aren’t there. There’s no Miranda warning.

A convenient argument – Murderers have more rights

“We didn’t give serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer a process and a lawyer because he’s a better guy than an immigrant. It was not about him but about the process. The fact that somebody isn’t a citizen should be irrelevant,” said Johnson. “Unfortunately we have seen this pattern through history. We always find a convenient argument on why certain people aren’t entitled to the same protections.”

Besides immigrants in deportation proceedings, there are very few civil detainees in the United States justice system.

Immigrants are treated the same as terrorists

“You have the Guantanamo Bay detainees, held under the laws of war but without process. You have people who have committed very serious sex offenses and there’s a finding that they’re likely to re-offend, and there are those who are severely mentally ill,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project. “The fact that immigration detainees are put next to those groups as the only groups of people who can be held in civil detention shows you how absurd the system really is.”

“We only reserve that kind of treatment for people who are extremely dangerous, have some inability to control themselves, those who are enemies of the US, and immigrants.”

Pilar Marrero is the national immigration reporter for ImpreMedia and author of Killing the American Dream.”

[Photo by Seattle Globalist/Flickr]

Subscribe today!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Must Read