News is circulating around California this morning about a UC Santa Barbara undergraduate who was taken to a detention center by Homeland Security agents last week. Her crime? Not being able to find her papers at 5:30 am.
Follow me on the other side for more details of this chilling story.
The purpose of the pre-dawn raid (already one starts to wonder why they're using that tactic) was a graduate student from Iran. The ICE agents "suspected irregularities" in her paperwork, although one wonders where they got that suspicion. That student was able to produce the documentation. However, agents then asked "anyone else here an immigrant?" When a roommate, an undergraduate originally from South Korea, volunteered - hoping to be cooperative and useful - she was told to find her documentation. At 5:30 in the morning she wasn't immediately able to. So she was arrested and taken to a "detention facility" over in Ventura.
Erik Love, one of the student's instructors at UCSB, has more to say about the matter at the Courage Campaign:
I have just been informed that the detained woman is a student in the class I am teaching this quarter. I am horrified. This student has visited me in office hours. She's almost always at lecture, and she has been a frequent contributor to the class discussion. I cannot believe that this is the reason that she's missed lecture the past few days....
I wonder how often this kind of thing happens. I obviously don't know all the facts, but from what I do know, the interrogation of these students seems utterly ridiculous...Why did they decide that my student, who apparently couldn't find her documents on the spot in the early morning hours, needed to be arrested right then and there? Why not just come back later to check on her, or require that she report to an immigration office within 48 hours or something like that? The immediate arrest and detention appears to me to be totally unwarranted.
I find myself in agreement with Erik on this. The article from the Daily Nexus - UCSB's student paper - that I linked at the outset of the diary explains this about immigration law:
Section 264 of the Immigration and Nationality Act states: "Every alien, 18 years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him. ... Any alien who fails to comply with [these] provisions shall be guilty of a misdemeanor." Possible punishments for violation of this section include fines and imprisonment.
The emphasis there is mine. A violation is a misdemeanor and imprisonment is only a possible punishment.
Update [2007-6-1 15:36:48 by eugene]: commentor boredhugekrill claims below that the Daily Nexus is likely in error and that this law was repealed 55 years ago; though shanikka argues he is in error and the law remains in force. It's still unclear what penalties exist for not carrying a student visa, but I believe that any person should be given a fair and reasonable chance to produce such documentation instead of being immediately detained.
The fact that the student was detained, the pre-dawn nature of the raid, and the random suspicion of non-native born students should all trouble us deeply. They suggest a US government that is slowly but steadily spinning out of control in its enforcement of immigration law. If they're going to raid students' homes at dawn, what's to stop them from going to the next step and stopping random people on the street and demanding to see their papers? And what legal protections do these non-citizens have? Or rather, what protections do actual citizens have as well?
If someone "looks foreign" and cannot produce documentation, but claims to be a US citizen, will that be enough to satisfy these agents? If someone is detained, how are they to be granted access to legal counsel? To a fair hearing? Especially for non-citizens this is a pressing issue, as the Bush Administration has all but declared they have no legal rights in this country.
I titled this diary "American Gestapo" because when I read of this pre-dawn raid - or of the dozens of similar pre-dawn raids targeted at Latino communities (we should be as outraged about those as we are about this UCSB incident) - I am reminded of old movies about the Nazis, about some slick but sinister Gestapo agent stopping the hero and asking in a thick accent, "vere are your papers? deine papieren, bitte!"
But any number of other terms would work. American KGB. American Stasi. American SAVAK. No matter what term you want to use, this incident is a clear case of a creeping police state. The paranoia about immigration has led our government to begin exercising truly disturbing levels of power, with sinister methodologies and an overkill response to what are minor violations of the law. It would be the equivalent of being arrested for having forgotten your wallet on a quick drive to the store.
cskendrick had a fantastic diary yesterday about the alarming erosion of our basic rights -
Why It's Now or Never, Right Now, For The Republic. This incident is a chilling reminder of the truth of his words.
Especially in the case of the actual Gestapo, when these secret police forces first began their work, there tended to be some level of public acceptance of their presence and their methods. To Germans in 1934, it was OK that the Gestapo was randomly arresting various Jews and dissidents - those folks were considered subversives, and the Gestapo wasn't really being unfair with them, they were just carrying out the law, and us good Germans would never have to worry about it coming after us.
As we know, this was a convenient rationalization, and it backfired on them badly. Will we make the same mistake? Will we sit here idly by while an arm of the US government employs tactics of the secret police against people we welcome into our country? Whatever one's stance on the politics of immigration, there can be no way that we support such arbitrary and unfair actions.
Update [2007-6-1 11:35:10 by eugene]: The student, Yoon Choi, "was recently transferred to an I.C.E. facility in San Pedro, and that an immigration judge will review her case to make the final decision regarding Choi’s future residence in the U.S." according to an article in today's UCSB Daily Nexus.