Posted on 06/15/2006 1:41:05 AM PDT by neverdem
A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that the government has wide latitude under immigration law to detain noncitizens on the basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation.
The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants detained after 9/11, and it dismissed several key claims the detainees had made against the government. But the judge, John Gleeson of United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, allowed the lawsuit to continue on other claims, mostly that the conditions of confinement were abusive and unconstitutional. Judge Gleeson's decision requires top federal officials, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, to answer to those accusations under oath.
This is the first time a federal judge has addressed the issue of discrimination in the treatment of hundreds of Muslim immigrants who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks and held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported. The roundups drew intense criticism, not only from immigrant rights advocates, but also from the inspector general of the Justice Department, who issued reports saying that the government had made little or no effort to distinguish between genuine suspects and Muslim immigrants with minor visa violations.
Lawyers in the suit, who vowed to appeal yesterday's decision, said parts of the ruling could potentially be used far more broadly, to detain any noncitizen in the United States for any reason.
"This decision is a green light to racial profiling and prolonged detention of noncitizens at the whim of the president," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the detainees. "The decision is profoundly disturbing because it legitimizes the fact that the Bush administration..."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Fugly....Thank God for the Venona Papers!!
The Govt has the rightful power to detain illegal aliens lawbreakers, with or without a war going on. This isn't hard to figure out.
Goodness, I hope so.
Well it certainly should have that rightful power, but it does seem to be at odds with that 14th amendment.
Government detention of illegal aliens is *not* against the 14th amendment, or our immigration laws would be a chaos.
SPEWING RACISM ON THE CITY DIME (Prof Leonard Jeffries)
Two guilty in beating of (74 y.o.)newspaper carrier (lawyer blames victim)
Iranian and Mexican soccer fans: With enemies like these, who needs friends
Of course, by reciprocity, other countries have broad powers to detain US citicizens indefinitely.
Goodness, I hope so.
I don't have a problem with racial profiling, but with Islam it can be a problem, e.g. look at folks in Albania, Thailand and the Philippines.
If they were detained on a battlefield, I don't have a problem.
don't many do that anyway already? oh...sorry its beheading isn't it.../sarcasm
You could always start with "We the People..."
It levels the field. Of the 27 nations that share a visa waiver program with the USA, virtually all of them retain the ability to detain US citizens/nationals for any reason. These are Andorra, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom*. http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/id_visa/vwp/vwp.xml
Thanks for the ping!
The ultimate in 0parsing....nevermind that much (most ) of the Constitution and asociated documents arelates ( applies ) to citizens of the United states.....
So what's new?
What's new? Now the US cannot claim that it's not reciprocity. Nor can we complain that people are held without charge, bail, access to lawyers, etc. Of course, the State Department now has less work to do; they can just let US citizens stay in jail if the jailing country claims it's important.
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