Living in the Machinery of Death, Part II

Last year, I wrote a post about my clerkship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Being a clerk on a federal court of appeals is one of the great honors a young lawyer can have, and one of the great honors of my life. It was a fantastic experience. I was privileged to be mentored by a fantastic judge, to gain a first-hand experience of the legal system across a wide range of cases, and to work with some outstanding colleagues whom I'm still friends with to this day.

I also said then, and will reiterate now, that if you tallied up all the cases I had a hand in during the course of my tenure of my clerkship, and judged them based on whether they effectuated justice or injustice, I'm convinced that on net they made the world a worse place.

And the reason really boils down to immigration. Our immigration docket was a relentless, sustained, unending exercise is ruining lives. That's all we were doing. And because our review was so perfunctory (it was perfunctory because the legal standards are aggressively anti-immigrant), we got  through a lot of them. I suspect that, in terms of raw numbers (though certainly not in time spent reviewing), we handled more immigration cases than any other type of case save criminal appeals (which, incidentally, also generally involved one-page affirmances of viciously overlong prison sentences).

Anyway, I bring it up again in reference to this story about Henry, a former teenage member of MS-13 who fled to America to escape the gang, ended up forcibly conscripted back into it, and so voluntarily turned himself into the police and freely gave them information essential to arresting other members of the gang. He thought in doing so he could get a fresh start, that the FBI would protect him.

Instead, he was betrayed. Once his usefulness was over, his handlers handed him over to ICE for deportation -- making no effort to hide the fact that he had informed on MS-13 (even as he was kept in a detention center with other MS-13 members), almost assuredly marking him for death at the hands of the gang either back in El Salvador or (if by some chance he is released) back home in Long Island. Sometimes I write on such stories that they're "worse than a crime, they're a blunder" (how does one expect to get people to inform on criminal gangs if the police so nakedly stab them in the back afterwards?). But here, the blunder -- real as it is -- is outweighed by the crime. Irrespective of any tactical assessment, we shouldn't lose sight of the more fundamental reality that our immigration system took a man who was by all accounts trying to do the right thing and sold him out in a way that quite foreseeably may lead to his murder. That's something we need to forthrightly acknowledge about ourselves.

Henry does not have a spotless record -- even less so than Juan Coronilla-Guerrero (whom I wrote about in my last post). But he does not deserve to die. It is not just our immigration system that may kill him. But it is by no means innocent. It is a machinery of death, and all those who touch it -- myself very much included -- have blood on our hands.

Pointing Fingers

This is literally the sort of thing I joke about. "Haha, some people are so clueless they would think a Black guy pointing his finger is a gang sign." Alas, now it's all over Minneapolis news. They shouldn't have actually needed the photographer (full disclosure: my college buddy) to have to tell them how "pointing" works, but it's journalistic malpractice to continue running with this lunacy.

And yet somehow, even though 3 hours ago this would have been the parody example of "paranoid racism", odds are that I'm going to be the one accused of "playing the race card."

Civil Rights Roundup: 09/08/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

Hopefully, the Senate will fast track the passage of the ADA when it returns from recess.

Students registering to vote on college campuses is confusing registrars.

The DOJ is widening its investigation after an Asian student with perfect SAT scores was rejected from Princeton University. The student says that he was rejected based on race, the school notes that there is more to a candidacy than SAT scores.

Some cities are turning to civil injunctions to curb gang violence, prohibiting, for example, gang members from meeting as being a "nuisance". The ACLU warns that this has the potential to criminalize normal daily activities and thus violates suspected gang members' civil rights.

The former dean of U. Washington's law school warned Nebraskans about what will happen to their school's diversity if it approves a ban on affirmative action. He should know -- Washington approved a similar ban in 1998, and watched minority enrollment plunge immediately after.

The Tucson Citizen urges its readership to vote no on Arizona's anti-gay marriage amendment.

An anti-gay marriage amendment in Florida is not polling strong enough to pass at the moment.

Should the constitution be amended to add a right to vote? I don't see why not.

Immigration courts still groan under a huge backlog, and are making only small progress it getting over it.

The New Yorker has an essay on Lily Ledbetter's request for equal pay, and John McCain (and his fellow GOPers) response.

A Florida town is now arresting people for wearing too-baggy pants. Unsurprisingly, the local Black community feels targeted, and one lawyer says the law is "designed to be pretextual."

The Orlando Sentinel looks at the history of the relationship between Florida Blacks and Latinos.

A homeowner in Montana discovered a racial covenant buried in his contract, dated from 1945. Though unenforceable, the man decided to leave it in as a reminder of the communities racially exclusive past.

Miami officials have settled a case in which prison guards were accused a beating a mentally-ill man into a coma.

Popping Dissertations

How a sociologist became a gang leader for a day. I wish I had time to pick it up, because it sounds absolutely fascinating.

Popping Dissertations

How a sociologist became a gang leader for a day. I wish I had time to pick it up, because it sounds absolutely fascinating.