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Comment by wolfi1 | Hacker News Reader

so habeas corpus just died in the US

It died when ICE started snatching people and deporting them without trial. (The government has the obligation to put each person before a court to at minimum prove they are not about to deport a US citizen.)

Incidentally, the position of the current administration is that they should have been able to, last night, send him to serve an indefinite sentence in an El Salvadoran torture prison without ever seeing a judge.

Don't throw away the baby with the bathwater (I live in the EU but hold on a minute...)

_this_ part doesn't work. Not "nothing works anymore". Perhaps there is a special court/system/subsystem that has authority for these cases. Just like Military has its own courts, and they don't try civilians, perhaps for such cases there is a "migration court" (or something-something...)

Unless there isn't in which case, damn those ICE folks are cold!!

No, ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They do not have any authority at all over US citizens who are not engaged in crossing an international border.

Additionally, the current position of the US government is that they should have been able to put this person it a torture prison in El Salvador without him ever seeing a judge.

Isn't it more of a concentration camp than a torture prison?

What do you believe the distinction is?

A concentration camp is a facility where individuals are detained without legal process, often based on their ethnicity or political beliefs, and typically under harsh conditions. In contrast, a prison is a legal institution where individuals are held after being convicted of a crime, following a judicial process.

Let me rephrase: what do you believe the distinction is between a concentration camp and a torture prison?

The judicial process.

My feeling based on the terseness of your reply is that you don't really want to support what you had said initially because there's no real difference or distinction to be made between a concentration camp, and a torture prison.

There is indeed a special immigration court system, but there's a catch. Those courts are "administrative courts", meaning that they are formally part of the executive, not the judiciary, and judges are also executive appointees. So they operate under rules that are themselves written by ICE, and with this admin's insistence on "unitary executive" theory, are entirely subject to the whims of the president.

To give you one example of how bad it already was before Trump, these are the same courts where 3-year old children who don't know English were required to argue their case before the judge by themselves, without a lawyer: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/children-immigration-court...

So it was already a sham as far as due process go. But now the executive says that they aren't obligated to give people a hearing at all.

And anyone working for ICE is a willing enforcer for this system. They should be treated accordingly.

> "To give you one example of how bad it already was before Trump"

That was during Trump's first term. Going in to this, we already saw how bad he was, so we should have expected worse this time. That's part of the reason this second term has a depravity multiplier. We knew, and chose him anyway.

The whole "children in courts without representation" does in fact predate even the Trump's first term. It certainly got much worse under him, but I hope that people will look at this beyond just the man and realize how well and truly fucked up the US immigration system has been for decades.

Maybe if you don't know anything then don't comment.

Then how do we learn?

Ask and don't tell people not to be concerned about their own government systems that you know nothing about.

I'm no state judge, but I think the states do have jurisdiction on kidnappings where the crime doesn't cross state lines.

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