Secret arrests – where people are snatched off the streets by government agents and whisked away without explanation — were hallmarks of the Nazis, the Stasi in East Germany, the Stalin government in Russia and several authoritarian South American regimes.
To those, add the United States of America.
We need your help to bring these arrests into the sunshine. We can’t do it alone.
Journalists are the sunshine people, of course. Our ability to be watchdogs comes from public access to what happens in halls of governments and courts. We make a living by telling you stories based on those happenings.
But government in the sunshine impacts everyone, not just journalists. It gives you the information you need to hold leaders accountable for what they do and how they spend your money. It compels the criminal justice system to treat people fairly and accord them their rights.
With nearly every kind of crime in this country, when people are arrested, everything is public. The names of arrested people are public, available from police who make the arrests, jails where they are held and courts that adjudicate their cases. Police reports detailing the crimes are public. Criminal charges are public. Court hearings are public, open to anyone who wants to bear witness. No step occurs without public accountability.
With secret arrests, we have no accountability. People disappear from among us. We don’t even know that they’ve been arrested, let alone who they are, what they are accused of or what is happening to them. And secrecy can hide rights violations and abuse.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are making secret arrests, right here in Northeast Ohio. Their targets are people who are in this country illegally.
This is not a column about the rightness or wrongness of arresting people in this country illegally. Donald Trump ran on a campaign of removing lawbreakers from our soil. It is his right to do so. Rather, this is a column about the indefensible, un-American secrecy of those arrests.
On Jan. 26, people in my town of Cleveland Heights buzzed on social media with news that ICE agents had arrested three people at a taco shop, including a mom with an infant at home. That’s the story some witnesses told, anyway, and that’s all our reporters had for their story. Cleveland Heights officials were told nothing. ICE refused to talk with us. The Geauga County jail, where ICE takes Northeast Ohio detainees, refused to provide any names.
We worked for days to get details, without success. Finally, in frustration, I decided we should put together a story on all the ways these arrests violate the basic principles of American criminal justice. I sent reporter Adam Ferrise to the immigration court to get as clear an understanding of the process as he can, to show how it differs from what we expect in our criminal justice system.
The immigration court at the federal courthouse occupies two floors with 10 courtrooms. Adam sat in on one, just to see what happens, and saw the cases of seven men get handled. Very few details emerged. Adam called me afterward to describe all of the challenges he faced in getting information.
Adam should have played the lottery that day. It turns out that of all the hearings he just happened to sit in on, his was the one with the people arrested at the taco place. It turns out that six people were arrested, not three, and all were men. No mom with an infant at home.
The names of the men were announced in the hearing, but those names are useless for looking at court records. Unlike with every other court we’ve dealt with, you cannot search the immigration court docket by name. You must have a nine-digit number assigned to the detainee. How do you get that number?
You can’t.
The courthouse does post the hearings it is having each day, but those lists show only the last 3 digits of the detainee numbers. Names are not listed.
This is a system designed to be secret. That’s not the American way.
What is the federal government hiding? Well, in this case, it was hiding hypocrisy by the Trump administration. Trump announced he would start his immigration sweeps with dangerous criminals who were in the country illegally – people with criminal records. None of the people arrested at the taco place had criminal records.
But, all are accused of being here illegally. Why not just say that? Why not list their names, what they are accused of and what will happen to them? Why not make the records public, as they are in every other court? Especially if you’re living up to a campaign promise.
The danger of secret arrests is that they grow. Today, they involve people in this country illegally. (Maybe. We can’t know that for sure without transparency.) But if we – all of us – don’t demand they be halted, they will expand. You need only look to history to see that.
Congress can stop this. The people who have sworn an oath to uphold American principles could insist that these arrests be public, the way all other crimes are, because that is how we do things in America. That’s where you come in. Call your representatives and senators to register your anger and dismay. Compel them to stand up for basic decency.
And be patient. We’re hearing from many people that they cannot get through to Congress members, especially to senators Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted. People tell us they don’t want to write emails, because they can be ignored. They want to call, but our senators have made themselves inaccessible. All I can say is keep trying.
I’m also hearing from people frantic to stop other actions by the administration, so I’m sure I’ll receive responses here about Elon Musk’s access to confidential records and the dismantling of government departments. If those actions are illegal, as some maintain, courts are the place to make a challenge.
But Congress has passed laws to make these secret arrests legal. You elect the Congress. You can help compel the change.
I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com
Thanks for reading.
This article was originally published by a www.cleveland.com . Read the Original article here. .