Donald Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, want a whiter America. The president even commented that he wanted Norwegians to immigrate to the U.S. As a result, their ICE policies have become cruel, and a judge is calling them out as “authoritarian.”
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest compared the Trump administration’s immigration policy to an authoritarian regime. She also said that the administration’s acts were “unconstitutional” when it decided to “pluck him out of his life without a moment’s notice,” according to The Washington Post.
Ravvi Ragbir came from Trinidad and Tobago, which is an island nation off of Venezuela’s coast. ICE rounded him up for deportation, but the judge said the man should have been given “the freedom to say goodbye” and the ability to get his affairs in order before he was arrested.
The New York immigrant advocacy group, New Sanctuary Coalition director, Ragbir, brought together 150 faith-based organizations. In 1994, he became a lawful resident of the U.S. Yet, authorities arrested and convicted him of wire fraud and conspiracy to accept fraudulent loan applications when he was a mortgage lender.
Ragbir served his sentence, then ICE ordered him deported. In 2010, he married an U.S. woman. When he went for his regular immigration check-in, ICE took him into custody. The shock caused him to lose consciousness, and he had to go to the hospital as a result.
Forrest read her seven-page opinion aloud to the court, The Washington Post reported:
‘It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have long lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home, and work. And sent away,” said Forrest,
who read her seven-page opinion aloud in court.’
Judge Forrest continued:
‘We are not that country, and woe be the day that we become that country under a fiction that laws allow it.’
Forrest said in her ruling that Ragbir realized authorities were deporting him:
‘But if due process means anything at all, it means that we must look at the totality of circumstances and determine whether we have dealt fairly when we are depriving a person of the most essential aspects of life, liberty and family. (It was wrong to) pluck him out of his life without a moment’s notice, remove him from his family and community without a moment’s notice. The process that is due here is the allowance that he know and understand that the time has come, that he must organize his affairs, and that he do so by a date certain.’
The judge said the government had no evidence Ragbir did anything unlawful:
‘Taking such a man, and there are many such men and women like him, and subjecting him to what is rightfully understood as no different or better than penal detention, is certainly cruel. The Constitution commands better.’
ICE released a statement to the Associated Press (AP). It read in part:
‘Concerned with the tone of the district court’s decision, which equates the difficult work ICE professionals do every day to enforce our immigration laws with ‘treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust. (ICE was) actively exploring its appellate options.’
The government released its statement:
‘Mr. Ragbir has received all the due process he is constitutionally due.’
Featured Image via Getty Images/Spencer Platt.
