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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this

To be clear, ICE does not require “judicial action” to remove aliens so using the phrase “extrajudicial action” makes no sense. See: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/expedite...

Note that even when expedited removal does not apply, deportation is handled by immigration courts which aren’t really courts at all, but instead Article I tribunals within the executive branch. And many decisions of these immigration “courts” aren’t appealable to the real judicial branch.

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What's to stop ICE from declaring anybody they don't like an alien and rendering them to the Salvadoran prison? We already know they're inventing false pretenses to classify people as gang members. There is no functional oversight of what they're doing.

> ICE does not require “judicial action” to remove aliens

…

> when expedited removal does not apply, deportation is handled by immigration courts

And how many of these recent cases have gone before an immigration court?

Are immigrants entitled to any form of due process?

Should they be, based on your personal principles?

To be clear, immigration “court” decisions aren’t “judicial action” either. Immigration courts are entities within the executive branch, which can’t exercise judicial powers. They’re a procedural device for the executive branch to control how it exercises its discretion. The immigration laws provide very limited judicial review of immigration court decisions—even where someone appeals an immigration court decision to a real court, the government can still deport that person during the legal challenge.

Immigrants are entitled to “due process”—but “due process” doesn’t mean “judicial process.” Due process is a flexible concept that depends on the nature of the legal right being asserted. Non-citizens have no constitutional right to be in the U.S. So in my view the only constitutionally required “process” is to verify whether someone is a citizen or not. And I think that can be done adequately within the executive branch.

> So in my view the only constitutionally required “process” is to verify whether someone is a citizen or not. And I think that can be done adequately within the executive branch.

Why were immigration courts created in the first place?

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