There’s a chasm in America these days, and it’s deep and wide and growing worse at a rate that could have produced the Grand Canyon overnight. And like that great divide, many strata have caused its expanse.
We could fill this paper with accounts of all those issues, but as significant as they are, one is literally ripping communities apart. It’s the divide between those who feel America is for people who look and speak like them, and anyone else isn’t welcome to come here or stay. And that it doesn’t matter whether those “others” came here to avoid persecution or violence in their home countries (Cambodians or Somalis), or because they were starving to death and couldn’t support their families (Haitians, for sure) – or because they were kidnapped, dragged away from their homelands and brought here to be sold as property (millions of Africans for hundreds of years) – or because they just wanted what they’d heard was a better way of life (nearly everyone else). And what’s more, it doesn’t even matter to the “purists” whether the “others” have been here for generations and are citizens and haven’t even had a parking ticket. Purity is purity for them.
The trouble is that even if you think our borders are porous and those “others” should go back where they came from, there’s a lawful way to enforce our immigration laws, and it doesn’t involve masked and unidentified strongmen grabbing black and brown people on the street and from their homes and jobs without probable cause or warrants – then holding them in disgusting detention centers, often separated from their families, and without any hope of getting before a judge to review the legality of their presence here and what the consequences should be. There were similar tactics used during that fascist regime almost a hundred years ago, and we fought a world war to stop it. We’re in another one now, and it’s right here in our midst.
And yet, except for well-intentioned demonstrations against these practices, no one seems to be proposing how to narrow or fill this gaping chasm between American rule of law and totally illegal, unconstitutional ruthlessness. So, here are a few suggestions we might consider, then modify as we see fit, and relentlessly confront our elected representatives with until they finally do what we sent them to statehouses and Congress for.
We need to start with a whole new corps of immigration magistrates and judges to process those currently being held in custody – and if those detainees haven’t been appointed lawyers and brought before those officials within a very short period of time, then they would be released. That would spring all but the really bad people almost immediately, which is what this major crackdown was supposed to be about in the first place. Remember?
Then, we need to quit grabbing American citizens of arbitrary hues and accents unless we’ve complied with those pesky provisions of the Constitution about searches and seizures, the right to counsel, and habeas corpus. And that includes people who were born here whether their parents were lawfully here or not – because we have something in the Constitution about that, too.
As for those who don’t have any legally established status to fall back on, they would be given a reasonable period of time to identify themselves to the appropriate authorities – ones with names and faces we can identify – and then be released for upcoming court appearances to determine their right to remain – because of valid asylum reasons or being brought here as a child, for example. Anyone who fessed up about his presence here would be given a sensible track toward becoming a legal resident or citizen; however, anyone who didn’t come forward voluntarily and was later arrested on a valid warrant would have to return to their country of origin and go to the end of the line. So, the incentive to comply would be overwhelming, and the consequences otherwise would be extreme. This may sound unduly harsh to some, but remember the critical need is to garner enough votes to create a system that’s more than wishful thinking.
There would surely be tweaks and wrinkles and compromises, but the process has to start somewhere, and the key word is “start,” which is not even a distant glimmer at this point. Instead, we get blowhard politicians trying to be tough guys to impress some imagined base of support, while the issue becomes harder to resolve as the years go by. What we can’t do is keep on with the terror tactics presently being used and think that’s a workable solution. That just splits up families and gets more innocent people killed as collateral damage. After all, we didn’t elect these representatives to make easy choices we all could make; we chose them to make the hard ones, and we could respect their fairness and integrity, whether we like every single provision or not. That’s called compromise and it’s what our Founders were counting on when they created this government of checks and balances. So, let’s have less chest-thumping and un-American behavior and let’s spend more time actually reading the Constitution and making it work for everyone.
L. Phillips Runyon III has practiced law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court for 27 years.