Wednesday, March 17, 2010

The ACLU’s War on U.S. Immigration Law

By Nicholas Stix

Middle American News
March 2006

While President George W. Bush, ICE, and Congress act as if the U.S. had no immigration laws and no borders, some heroic local officials and private organizations have nevertheless sought, against all odds, to enforce and uphold immigration law. And every time they have done so, the ACLU has been there to fight them, on behalf of the criminals invading America.

A study of the tactics of local ACLU chapters across the country and the national ACLU reveals a distinct, coordinated strategy of six components:

1. Abusing the English language, by referring to illegal immigrants as “immigrants” and “undocumented workers,” in order to make it seem as if illegal immigrants, all of whom are criminals (and in the case of those who have previously been deported, felons), were law-abiding, legal residents;

2. Misrepresenting immigration law, to make it appear as though law enforcement officials were harassing non-criminals;

3. Misrepresenting the duties of local law enforcement, to make it appear as though they were abusing their power, in order to discriminate against “immigrants”;

4. Misrepresenting the actions of local law enforcement, to make it appear as though they were “racially profiling immigrants”;

5. Initiating frivolous lawsuits targeting any actions by state or local officials enforcing immigration law, including but not limited to actions which prevented illegal immigrants from enjoying privileges and services to which they were not legally entitled; and

6. Expanding the above five strategies to other types of law, such as election law, in conspiring to rig American elections through flooding them with the fraudulent votes of illegal immigrants.

For instance, an April 16, 2005 ACLU press release that was published by BBS News as if it were a news story asserted,

Since April 1, armed private individuals under the so-called “Minuteman project” have come to Arizona for the purported purpose of spotting and reporting individuals who the Minutemen claim are violating federal immigration law. In fact, there have been growing reports and allegations of abuse of immigrants as a result of the Minutemen’s activities. Increasingly, it appears that private citizens near the Arizona border are engaging in illegal treatment of immigrants….

Eleanor Eisenberg, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arizona, added, “The Minuteman project has created a powder-keg situation with the potential to go beyond harassment and false imprisonment to real violence. We hope that our observer project will continue to shed light on the activities of the Minutemen and will ensure that private citizens do not detain, harass or humiliate others in violation of the law.”

The press release spoke of criminals as “immigrants” and as crime victims, while defaming as criminals the Minutemen, who were in fact upholding not only the spirit but the letter of the law.

In spite of the defamatory charges it made (“harassment and false imprisonment”), the ACLU did not even claim to have evidence that the Minutemen had violated any laws. Thus, the ACLU was agitating to have the legal rights of American citizens violated, at the same time that it was agitating for rights to be granted to illegal aliens that do not exist in American law.

The ACLU speaks of “discrimination” to describe the mere enforcement of immigration law, and of “alienage,” to insinuate that people whose very existence on American soil is a crime, were a group deserving of civil rights protection.

On October 25, Chris Link, the executive director for the Ohio ACLU, sent a press release to the media, “ACLU calls for [Allen County Sheriff Dan] Beck to end race-based profiling.” Sheriff Beck countered that Link had no proof that Beck or his deputies were engaging in racial profiling; Link then admitted that she had no evidence for her scurrilous charge. According to the October 26 Lima (OH) News,

[Link] said she worries there is something to all the concerns about which she has heard and read.

[Sheriff] Beck said she has nothing and cannot find anything to show his deputies have profiled any-one based on race. Beck said the bigger issue is that Link and her agency are trying to put pressure on police agencies that address the illegal immigration issue.

Indeed, the ACLU’s Chris Link has in so many words demanded that Sheriff Beck restrict himself to arresting white American citizens. “By doing that [arresting illegals], he is essentially turning his back on another criminal element just because they are white and that is poor police work,” she said.

Note Chris Link’s presumption that she may order the sheriff, who is obliged to uphold all laws, to enforce certain laws against a certain group of people, and not enforce certain laws against another group of people, and her insinuation that white American lawbreakers are running wild in Allen County.

Meanwhile, the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project seeks to make it impossible for election officials to stop, much less arrest, those who are ineligible from voting in American elections.

ACLUs’ attacks on local law enforcement all derive political and programmatic sustenance from the national ACLU’s Immigrants' Rights Project, which should properly be called the Illegal Immigrants' Rights Project, since it is to illegal immigrants that the title refers. The ACLU has in turn been aided and abetted in its campaign to gut U.S. immigration law by newspapers which have misrepresented illegals as simply “immigrants,” and by judges who share the ACLU’s contempt for U.S. immigration law, in undoing the work of local law enforcement.

In April 2002, Lucas Guttentag, the director of the ACLU’s [Illegal] Immigrants’ Rights Project, attended a conference in support of illegal immigration at UC Berkeley. As reported by Chris Nichols in the April 27, 2002 Berkeley Daily Planet,

According to Guttentag, deportation and executive detention have gone unsupervised and unscrutinized by the government. This lack of supervision has caused the central protection of habeas corpus to be ignored.

“Habeas corpus is the principle and ultimate safeguard. Deportation without access to the rights of habeas corpus is a violation of the constitution,” said Guttentag.

Actually, whether illegal immigrants may be granted habeas corpus is highly contentious, and not at all a “central protection” of them; thus, refusal to grant an illegal immigrant a writ of habeas corpus is not necessarily a violation of the Constitution.

And as VDARE.com columnist Juan Mann has repeatedly shown, the reality of the immigration bureaucracy is the opposite of that depicted by Lucas Guttentag. Illegal immigrants are getting endless opportunities to either abscond via the ICE practice of “catch-and-release,” or to endlessly plead baseless cases via the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR).

The ACLU’s current Internet ad for a 2006 intern position in its [illegal] “Immigrants’ Rights Project” announces,

Using targeted impact litigation, advocacy and public outreach, the Project carries on the ACLU’s historic commitment to protecting the rights and liberties of [illegal] immigrants. In federal district and appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, the Project conducts the nation’s largest impact litigation program dedicated to defending and expanding the rights of [illegal] immigrants, enforcing the guarantees of the Constitution, and achieving equal justice under the law.

The Project has focused on challenging laws that deny [illegal] immigrants access to the judicial system, impose indefinite and mandatory detention, and constitute discrimination on the basis of “alienage” by governmental and private entities….

[The ad cites “suits challenging selective enforcement and other forms of discrimination.”]

Our Education program is focused on reaching out to the Latino [illegal] immigrant community in California and addressing the effects of “vigilante” actions around the country as well as the impact of the recent Real ID legislation.

“The rights and liberties” of illegal immigrants? For make no mistake about it, the immigrants the ACLU is primarily concerned about are illegals. You cannot “expand” rights that do not exist. The ACLU is acting on behalf of the notion that syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts has called the “squatters’ rights” approach to law. That means that if authorities do not enforce extant laws for a certain period, activists like the ACLU not only act as if the statutes did not exist, but as if the “squatters” violating the law (in this case, illegal aliens) enjoyed positive rights nowhere existing in law.

Consider the ACLU’s statement that it is fighting “discrimination on the basis of ‘alienage’ by governmental and private entities….” In practice, what that means is that if a state passes a law denying public services or driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, the ACLU will challenge the law as “discriminatory.” Never mind that it was already illegal, according to federal law, to provide public services or driver’s licenses, or private services such as bank accounts or mortgages to illegal aliens.

The notion that enforcing immigration law in the case of illegal immigrants constitutes “discrimination” is logically the same as saying that enforcing the laws against stealing cars constitutes “discrimination” against auto thieves.

“Equal justice under the law” and “the [other] guarantees under the Constitution” apply only to American citizens. Likewise, civil liberties are those freedoms due to citizens. The ACLU, however, has for years worked to reverse things. The organization seeks to steal the rights of Americans, disenfranchise them, and give those rights to illegal aliens. The ACLU seeks thus to make illegal aliens citizens, and make Americans helpless aliens in their own land. As Carly Simon once sang, “The world’s just inside out and upside down.”

The ACLU’s name is misleading. The organization supports neither civil liberties nor America.

Even more chilling than the realization of what the ACLU is up to, is the realization that the President of the United States is—for perhaps different reasons—up to the same thing.

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