The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    Does Locating migrant holding pens on military bases + revocation of birthright citizenship =concentration camps beyond the reach of Habeas Corpus?

    We have leaned in recent months that the proposed solution to the flood of refugees seeking adjudication of their asylum claims will not be to increase the number of tribunals, but to prepare to house for years on miitary bases the resulting multitudes frozen "in transit" (usage taken advisedly)

    Hard upon adoption of that policy, the visible tide feeding this population is routinely forced by similar (and explicitly intentional) under resourced processing personnel at "ports of entry" to congregate on the Mexican side of thee border for indeterminate (and increasingly interminable) periods of time.

    Add the militarization of the border now trumpeted. (See what I did there?)

    Into this vile repudiation of the obligations imposed by International Law governing asylum, add the retroactive (because, why not?) pronouncement that those American children of undocumented immigrants who used to furnish the heartbreaking subtext of their parents deportation are really not American at all.

    If those military jurisdictional tent cities concentration camps are located at (or even, (deity of choice) forbid, just over the Mexican border, with how much efficacy can we be certain that judicial injunctions such as those which (only temporarily, as it has happened) discommoded the Muslim Entry Ban can be relied upon to enforce the mandate of the 14th Amendment.

    Current Habeas Corpus jurisdiction was only extended to Guantanamo's extraterritorial  locus after several years of  intense litigation, and an important distinction of that victory is that criminal as opposed to immigration law was at issue.

    And, of course, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld was decided by a court including Scalia and Kennedy, not  Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

    This is already ugly--it can get a  lot uglier.

     

     

    Comments

    For an historical precedent of terrifyingly recent vintage (and a very local one at that) the Domenican Republic reached back in 2005 to deracinate 250,000 putative citizens by redefining what it means for one's parents to be "in transit" at the time a child was born on Dominican soil to a non Dominican mother.

     

    Dominican court ruling renders hundreds of thousands stateless

     

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dominicanrepublic-citizenship/dominic...


    Of course, the whole weapoonization of port of entry delay relies upon an illegal refusal to accept asylum petitions at other locations, which Trump touts today as a feature of his war on refugees (which will include adopting the odious Israeli practice of responding to stone throwers with rifle fire, once he replaces Mattis with Steven Miller as Secdef.)


    This whole situation is maddening because there are so many direct violations of international law. Denying asylum being at the top of the list.

    The established of "detention centers" on military bases is more than troubling, and so is the outsourcing to private corrections corporations.

    The specter that floats before my eyes is that Trump will ultimately attempt to put "traitors" in such camps. At this point, those traitors include all elected Democrats amd everyone who does not vehemently support him. No questions or criticisms allowed.

    We are in very dangerous times

    First They Came - by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller

    First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a communist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.


    The international law violations seem (for reasons not immediately obvious to me....) to raise a special sensitivity in the ruling class, as exemplified by the vigorous pushback  blackmail that the spectre of Palestinian complaints to the UN vis-a-vis US relocation of the embassy, etc. aroused,

     

    https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/02/politics/trump-palestinian-aid/index.html


    A rather whimsical aside on the Niemoller quote....

     

    Image result for First they came for the white man ...No one comes for the white  man