@natcad.bsky.social
Border human rights lawyer. Soon-to-be law professor. Studying migrant disappearance. Making records for now and later. Impatient. Punching up. Rio Grande Valley - Tucson - San Diego. Thoughts and views my own and not that of my employer.
The Trump admin AGAIN claims that it's an "emergency" that they can't immediately strip 350,000 people (most who entered legally and have never undocumented) of their ability to legally remain in the United States, even though conditions in Haiti have only been getting worse.
The lesson from every community that's won: the government counts on silence. The moment a deal becomes public, it becomes vulnerable. @BaltimoreBanner @stateline_news @WashingtonPost and austinkocher.substack.com
To date, at least 9 warehouse deals have been canceled due to local community opposition in Utah, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Virginia, Mississippi, and more. Communities that spoke up early, organized fast, and pressured property owners have stopped facilities from opening.
The only reason any of this is visible? Public records sleuths. Project Salt Box was first to report DHS had purchased the Hagerstown warehouse, by reading property deeds filed in Washington County. Everything they publish comes from public documents.
In Merrimack, NH, town manager said: "Most of the information we have received on this facility has been through news leaks & government has not reached out to us yet." State's historic preservation office didn't even tell the governor, its top official resigned under pressure
In rural Berks County, PA, a commissioner called the DA, sheriff, jail warden, and emergency services after hearing ICE might be coming. No one knew anything. Days later, land records showed ICE had already bought the building for $87.4M. “There was absolutely no warning.”
In Socorro, TX a town of 40,000 outside El Paso a deed was filed showing DHS had already inked a $122.8M deal for 826,000 sq ft of warehouse space before the mayor received any communication. "Nobody from the federal government bothered to pick up the phone," the mayor said.
ICE has a playbook for buying warehouse detention centers: move fast, tell nobody, and let communities find out from property records or news leaks. It's happened in at least 20 towns across the country. A thread. 🧵
A contrived “people” without a geography to justify it wants a homeland <—- that’s as dangerous as it gets.
We need enforced disappearance legislation at state and federal levels to criminalize enforced disappearance, prevent officials from taking removal actions against an individual while they are held in incommunicado and unregistered detention, and to ensure remedies for victims and survivors.
Sigh. Transferring people and not timely updating the ICE detainee locator or telling family or lawyers where they are has long been a tactic of enforced disappearance used by DHS to hinder the filing of habeas petitions to defend rights. This is just one recent example: apple.news/AhOtuCu2FTby...
And, as always, if someone is disappeared (don't know where they are, not in any public registry, gov won't say where they are, and they're incommunicado), you can and should report it to the United Nations enforced disappearances experts here: www.ohchr.org/en/special-p...
For other examples of the ways that DHS has been forcibly disappearing people for decades, check out my article here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
We need enforced disappearance legislation at state and federal levels to criminalize enforced disappearance, prevent officials from taking removal actions against an individual while they are held in incommunicado and unregistered detention, and to ensure remedies for victims and survivors.
Freedom for Immigrants has an excellent report on this very issue from 2021: www.freedomforimmigrants.org/news-and-upd...
Such short-term enforced disappearances prevent advocates from knowing where someone is for just long enough to enable other human rights violations, such as violations of due process or carrying out deportations that are otherwise contrary to law.
Sigh. Transferring people and not timely updating the ICE detainee locator or telling family or lawyers where they are has long been a tactic of enforced disappearance used by DHS to hinder the filing of habeas petitions to defend rights. This is just one recent example: apple.news/AhOtuCu2FTby...
Correction. Orwell never said this. He did however, warn that: "political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (That's Politics and the English Language, one of my favorite essays)
Exactly. What we are seeing now is what I call the Border Patrolification of ICE. Voting over the decades to send more militarization and harsher processes for asylum seekers at the border at the expense for protections for people in the interior was a Faustian gamble that hasn’t paid off.
Excited to listen later!
(Still holding out for an episode on Sale v. Haitian Centers Council)
Exactly. What we are seeing now is what I call the Border Patrolification of ICE. Voting over the decades to send more militarization and harsher processes for asylum seekers at the border at the expense for protections for people in the interior was a Faustian gamble that hasn’t paid off.
We are proud to announce the launch of our universal representation pilot program to provide free, merits-blind legal representation to people in immigration detention facing deportation, regardless of their demographics or legal claims.
🇺🇸📹 El congresista demócrata Al Green fue expulsado tras mostrar un cartel que decía: “Los negros no son monos”, en referencia al video que publicó Donald Trump, donde se refería al matrimonio de Barack y Michelle Obama como “monos” dozz.es/sc72q62
There is also routine explicit coercion by officers who want to increase their removal numbers. Too many officers will lie to the people they have detained to convince them that defending themselves will come at too high a cost.
I’ve spoken to too many lawyers whose clients were murdered upon deportation after they lost the will to keep fighting their case from detention. It has been this way for decades. Detention is meant to break people into giving up, even at the ultimate cost. The system works as it was designed to.
The City of Tucson is considering regulations on large-scale data centers. The first draft is bad. We need mayor and council to redirect staff to write regulations that make it impossible to build large-scale data centers in our community. Here's more info and how you can help.
It has been two days since Professor Ilan Wurman acknowledged that there is an inaccurate statement in the brief that submitted to the Supreme Court in the birthright citizenship case. To my knowledge, he has no plans to amend the brief. This is a problem to which I will continue to draw attention.
The lesson is that violating human rights anywhere does not protect others. Hurting asylum seekers in Arizona does not help our neighbors in New York. Human rights should never be bargaining chips. We are paying the price now.
The Faustian trade of more boots and militarization at the border in exchange for “our neighbors” in the interior got us to this point. Every refugee seeking asylum who has been screwed over by Dems trying to appeal to centrists was sacrificed for nothing.
What we are seeing are models that have long been used against migrants far from cities and the interior. We are seeing an expansion of the policies that Dems endorsed to be carried out at the border now being deployed at rapid speed in the interior.