from the oof-get-streisanded,-kid dept
No matter what the DHS and ICE say about the justification of ICE officers remaining masked during raids, it’s all about avoiding public accountability. DHS boss Kristi Noem says alarmist things about ICE officers being “targeted” or “doxxed,” but it’s all about inflicting America with its own secret police while it undergoes the process of being made great again (for the second time).
The administration can pretend it’s about ICE officer safety, but the undeniable fact is that the number of assaults on officers is a rounding error compared to the massive increase in full-blown raids of any place some brown people might possibly be found.
What should never have changed is how things are handled in court. Remaining anonymous is a luxury, not a right, and it only applies in certain extreme circumstances — and only after a judge has made a determination to allow a party (or their legal representative) to proceed anonymously.
Immigration courts and their judges aren’t quite as responsive to transparency as other federal courts. That being said, it should never have come to this: immigration judges preemptively granting anonymity to government lawyers during deportation hearings. That’s apparently becoming the new normal, at least in a couple of courts, as Debbie Nathan reports for The Intercept.
Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.
“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.
Who’s “we,” Judge Xu? Everyone in attendance knows who you are, along with the names of the immigrants and their lawyers. “We” cannot possibly be the government’s lawyer, because only one person is being granted this extremely peculiar privilege.
The non-government parties objected to this unearned and completely unexpected anonymity but it didn’t matter. Judge Xu also apparently felt the non-government parties weren’t deserving of any legal justification for her decision to omit the name of the ICE lawyer from the public record:
Xu attributed the change to “privacy” because “things lately have changed.”
What had “changed” went unexplained. Either this judge was buying into ICE’s bullshit about assaults on ICE employees (which is a number so low it provokes unintentional laughter) or the government had decided it wanted anonymity and the judge decided she was going to oblige the party with the most power.
Either way, Judge Xu isn’t the only one doing this.
It is unclear how many immigration judges are failing to say ICE lawyers’ names, but The Intercept has witnessed the practice twice. On July 10, Judge James McCarthy in lower Manhattan neglected to identify the government’s attorney in several cases, referring to the lawyer instead as “Department.”
“Department, are we done with pleadings?” McCarthy asked. The word stood in for ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Several immigration defense attorneys were attending the hearings by video. None objected.
That’s a whole lot of bullshit, ranging from the judge’s willingness to allow this to the immigrants’ legal reps failing to object. Granted, sometimes it’s best to just shut up and address only the legal matters directly affecting your case. But the more this sort of thing occurs without comment by targets of government legal action, the more comfortable government lawyers are going to be going forward with refusing to add their names to the public record.
The ICE lawyer who went unnamed by Judge Xu did, however, provide her name to the opposing counsel. She’s Cosette Shachnow, who is now the figurehead of this new opacity effort by ICE/DHS, whether or not she truly deserves to be. There’s nothing in the article that suggests Shachnow demanded anonymity, but there’s nothing in there either that suggests she opposed something that might have been an ICE directive, rather than her own personal choice.
Either way, everyone knows her now. And every time the government uses its power and will to shield itself from accountability, it will run into people who are very determined to undermine this unearned privilege. DHS head Kristi Noem may complain about “doxxing” of masked ICE officers, but nothing mobilizes social reaction like deliberately refusing to play by the rules.
If the government is going to impose its will on the public, it should have the strength of character to accept the accountability that’s supposed to accompany the massive amount of power it wields. That means ICE officers should identify themselves, obtain actual judicially issued warrants before engaging in arrests, and be honest about the limits of their administrative paperwork, which doesn’t actually give them the right to enter private spaces and/or detain people who aren’t the actual target of their investigations.
And the government’s lawyers should be willing to go on record when in court. If you don’t actually believe in the cause, get the fuck out. Don’t just sit there converting the infliction of bigoted misery on others into a paycheck unless you’re willing to own it. If you want to be one of the baddies, be big enough to let everyone know it. Otherwise, you’re not only a traitor to the American way of life, but a coward as well.
Filed Under: cosette shachnow, cowards, dhs, ice, immigration courts, james mccarthy, mass deportation, shasha xu, transparency, trump administration
