Although some are claiming her stance on immigration is preceded by years of anti-immigrant policy in the previous Clinton White House, I’m still totally flabbergasted by Hillary Clinton’s recent spate of comments calling for swift deportation of immigrants, with no due process. Until today, I was still not completely decided on who I wanted to vote for in the primary next Tuesday. There are a lot of things I actually like about Clinton: I’m more impressed with her take on universal health care, and I strongly believe in the need for a woman in the White House someday soon. But unless this is a hoax, or there’s some explanation that convinces me it’s all wildly misconstrued, there is now a 0% chance I will vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The New York Sun is known for having a somewhat neocon bent, but they’re far from being Fox News or the Post. Unless they’re flat-out lying, this is not a single slip of the tongue or ill-considered comment we’re talking about here. Keep in mind this is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about here. She’s not only a very savvy political operative who’s not known for making absurd slip-ups, she’s also been a lawyer for the last 35 years, and started her law career interning at a civil rights firm. But nevertheless, she said these things on three different occasions to three different audiences:
“Anybody who committed a crime in this country or in the country they came from has to be deported immediately, with no legal process. They are immediately gone…”
“[Aliens with criminal records] should be deported, no questions asked.”
[About illegal aliens who have committed crimes] “No legal process. You put them on a plane to wherever they came from.”
She apparently wants to put immigration lawyers out of business, not to mention public defenders who represent non-citizens. I can’t believe she’d toss due process out the window, even to earn points with certain audiences for being “tough on immigration.” Pandering is no excuse for taking a torch to the Fifth Amendment! Isn’t due process part of what’s supposed to set Democrats apart from the Constitution-burning Bush administration? Aren’t liberals supposed to be concerned about the abuses at Guantanamo, about prisoners being locked up or tortured with no fair trial, just because they’re not citizens or suspected of a crime? This is serious facepalm territory we’re in at this point.
Even if we agree for a second that yes, we want to deport “bad criminals” and not let them live here like the “good immigrants,” how can anyone possibly think you can figure that out “immediately” with “no questions asked?” The whole point of due process is that you determine who’s actually a criminal and who’s not, right? Who deserves a chance at living here and who doesn’t? The point is that everyone, citizen or no, is equal before the law, and that since not all crimes are committed equally, we have a process. And of course, even the process does not work perfectly, so there are appeals; we don’t just throw people away. Well actually, we do under the current administartion — but you’d think a candidate who trumpets about change would not be encouraging the current state of affairs:
To say boldly “We don’t need no process, just send the criminals home!” belies your complete lack of basic competence on immigration. How do you imagine this working? Arrest the guy, see if he has an accent, and drive him over a random border?
This is probably a good working description of the system we have now. ICE (immigration) has trained local jail staff to go through and put holds on guys with spanish names and transport them to a federal detention nearby to be deported with almost no checks. I really don’t know what the best solution here is, but less process is certainly not the answer.
(Fledermaus commenting at Obsidian Wings, where there are lots of good comments on this story, including background on how immigration controls became harsher during the last Clinton’s heyday.)
It’s not as if we’re currently operating on some incredibly lax system that’s letting all sorts of people in. Quite the contrary: I hear more and more stories all the time about families who slip through the cracks, deportations of kids who have never lived anywhere else, countless abuses by the Homeland Security, even of tourists who slightly overstayed their visa ten years earlier. And Clinton apparently wants to make this harsher and faster. There are far too many stories like this one, described by crankyliberal, an immigration attorney:
Really, Hillary? Do you want to know how many Lawful Permanent Residents I’ve helped lately who were in proceedings for a single drug possession conviction? These people have been here for over 20 years in most cases, have families and jobs, and screwed up. One of them was a bit stressed out after surviving cancer and also having to take care of her mother who is suffering from cancer. So she did some drugs. Right now, they have a chance to prove that they deserve to stay because the positive equities outweigh the negative. Now, that’s their only chance- if they ever screw up again, they’re removed, no questions asked.
But you want to take that away? Take away their chance to prove their worth? A chance that people value so much they’ll sit in detention for six months (not to mention the extra time if there is an appeal lodged- that means a year or more easily)even though many of them have never been in jail once?
My mother is an immigrant, a resident alien who’s lived here for over 40 years. I guess I ought to warn her not to drive recklessly and be more careful with how she fills out her taxes, since if she slips up even the Democrats will be gunning for her now.
crankyliberal goes on to talk about how absurd it is that Clinton implies that we ought to condemn and deport criminals who have a criminal record in their country of origin. I guess we don’t need due process if we just trust every other legal system in the world, huh? How can you even make a statement like that without thinking about all the corrupt, despotic laws and criminal justice systems in the world? Without thinking of people who apply for asylum after having been persecuted in their own countries? And that’s to say nothing of the idea that someone who commits a crime here should just be shipped off; at the moment, I thought, people who commit crimes in the US are given a fair trial and then, if found guilty, serve their sentences here. But I guess that’s not what Clinton wants; she’d be fine with shipping some criminals back to countries where they won’t be prosecuted?
The most deeply disturbing thing here is that Clinton’s rhetoric, whether she believes it or not, is supporting a medieval, unconstitutional worldview where there are “bad people” out there who don’t deserve rights, who don’t deserve due process. We can just recognize them — through some sort of “faster” un-process, whether that means profiling, arrest, or glancing at their record — and then boot them. I really hope someone can explain to me how this is all a mistake or a misunderstanding. Otherwise, the only explanation I can come up with will be that the last eight years of constant abuse of our laws and principles have shifted discourse a grotesque degree towards a paranoid police-state. So far that even centrist liberals like Clinton are now willing to crap all over the Constitution to score some points with Democratic primary voters who <b>actually like</b> hearing that rights to legal process are being torched. It’s a very depressing thought.
(via Ampersand)