Masked Goons or Simply Frightened Cops?

 
"The right of people to be secure in their persons,

houses,

papers, and

effects

against unreasonable searches and seizures, 

shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause

supported by Oath or affirmation,

and particularly describing the place to be searched,

and the persons or things to be seized."

--Fourth Amendment (ratified 1791)

United States Constitution

So, that was written in the 18th century, but the anger which prompted that amendment arose from ordinary citizens being mistreated, accosted on the streets and in their homes--there were no automobiles then--and Americans wanted to be sure they were not bothered, harassed, treated with arrogant disregard, made powerless by the soldiers or police with guns, as they lived their lives in America.

If you wore a red uniform, carried the seal of the King, then you could do whatever you liked under the British and Americans wanted to be sure they would not have to put up with such stuff in their new country.

One thing which makes a seizure unreasonable, it ought to be clear is if the person or persons arresting you cover their faces, travel in unmarked cars and show no identification beyond a metal badge anyone can purchase on line. 

ICE agents, and now their collaborators, the local police or sheriffs are hiding behind baklavas, wearing no identifiable uniforms and using unmarked vans--is that not, ipso facto, unreasonable?

Oh, Blondie Bondi protests: The officers are being "doxxed" and their families are receiving threats from those mysterious, invisible drug cartels! So our police and ICE agents can become like those Star War automatons in white armor, robots seizing anyone walking, working or traveling while Brown and spiriting them away to prisons in El Salvador or Sudan or Gitmo, because, you know, they are possibly illegal aliens, which means,  you know, they almost certainly have raped and murdered white women here in the USA.

The question I have is this: If these guys are so afraid they are wearing masks and unwilling to identify themselves: Should we not ask them whether maybe they should go into another line of work? I mean, did Elliot Ness or Wyatt Earp cower behind masks? And don't try to tell me Dodge City was any less dangerous than some (possibly imaginary) cartels.

And then there is the Sixth Amendment: 

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed...and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusations; to be confronted with the witnesses against him...and to have Assistance of Counsel for his defense."

If you are wrestled into a van in Maryland and dumped in a prison in El Salvador or in Vermont or New Orleans, then ipso facto, your 6th amendment rights have been violated.

If your masked abductors do not have to reveal themselves, you do not even know who is making the accusation: again violating the 6th amendment.

You are certainly not "safe in your person."

And those rights are not just for citizens but for anyone walking down the street in the USA.

Of course, the Trumplings have tried to evade those inconvenient rights by whisking people off to Gitmo, saying the Constitution does not apply in that Black Site, but, that of course does not explain how you can violate all those rights in Maryland or New Hampshire and all those protections melt away as soon as your plane lands in Gitmo.

Mad Dog is no lawyer, but he can read.

And Professor Google is a help. 

And then there is that old sticky principle "Habeas Corpus" which means the government has to justify the arrest of anyone.

Article One gives the one exception: the government can suspend habeas corpus in the case of Rebellion or Invasion as the public safety may require it."

So here is where the Trumplings try a sleight of hand: By calling illegal immigrants an "invasion" they can say, oh we have an exception here. Except, invasion means Mexican troops pouring across the border with Santa Anna waving his sword. If you want to go all Scalia and originalist, the meaning of invasion is not simply a convenient metaphor, it is an actual invasion by an identifiable army.

Unless, of course, you are Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and maybe Coney-Barrett, because then, anything goes, if Trump says so.

It is here where watching the movie, "Judgment At Nuremberg" is helpful. 

Based on the trial of German judges who carried out the laws of the Third Reich as Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler commanded, the American prosecutors are, at first knocked off guard.  German judges on trial approved of sterilization of "undesirables" who included Communists or anyone thought to be mentally deficient, and the German defense counsel reads the opinion of Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Bell case, in which he concludes sterilization of the woman Bell was justifiable as "three generations of imbeciles are enough." What the German defense attorney is saying of course is Americans were models for the German race theorists--with the eugenics movement of the Boston/Harvard era in the 1920's providing a "scientific" basis for excluding undesirable races from America and preventing some undesirables already here from reproducing.  Teddy Roosevelt described allowing immigration of populations from undesirable places like Italy, Africa and Central America as "race suicide." 

Now, we are drifting back to those days which gave us the "Chinese exclusion act" and when Henry James describes a Jew walking across Boston common in great detail with repugnance, describing his black frock, his sideburns and that description pops up nearly verbatim in "Mein Kampf."

So, America has been in some very nasty places before. We swung back toward valuing diversity and tolerance, and then the pendulum may have swung a little too far, as campuses made it a requirement for hiring that professors swear a loyalty oath to DEI.

But here we are, with that pendulum swung back to the anti immigrant thing where people are described as insects and sub-humans and no law protects them.