A Devastating Week for Immigrants, Due Process, and the Rule of Law

This was a devastating week for immigrants, for due process, and for the rule of law. Three major legal decisions landed in rapid succession, and together they have fundamentally changed what it means to live in this country without full legal status — and what it means to be a neighbor, a colleague, a congregation member, or a friend of someone who doesn't.

Here's what happened, and what it means for Berks County:

The Supreme Court ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to protect people from countries where conditions — war, natural disaster, catastrophic violence — make return genuinely dangerous. Haiti has been designated since the 2010 earthquake. Syria since 2012. Neither country is safe now. The U.S. State Department currently warns American citizens not to travel to either one.

None of that mattered to the Court's six-member conservative majority. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices ruled that the Secretary of Homeland Security's decision to terminate TPS is simply not subject to judicial review. Courts cannot second-guess it. Even when — as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a searing dissent — the evidence of racial animus is "there, plain to see in the president's own statements," statements so repellent that even the government's own lawyers declined to repeat them in court.

The practical result: 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians who have lived and worked here legally — in some cases for more than a decade, with American-born children and deep roots in their communities — will lose their status, their work authorization, and their protection from deportation. Attorneys for the Haitian plaintiffs said the ruling "will directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths."

The Supreme Court also ended the right to seek asylum at the border.

Under a policy called "metering," border agents physically block asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil — turning them back, placing them on indefinite waitlists, forcing them to wait in dangerous conditions in Mexico. Courts had twice ruled this illegal. The Supreme Court reversed those decisions, holding that a person standing at the border who has not yet crossed does not "arrive in the United States" — and therefore has no right to apply for asylum.

The result is perverse and the Court knows it: as Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the only way to legally seek asylum is now to enter the country illegally. The ruling, she wrote, "blesses the Executive Branch's decision to slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution."

A federal appeals court expanded expedited removal nationwide.

Expedited removal allows an ICE officer — without a judge, without a hearing, without judicial review — to arrest, detain, and deport someone on the spot. Before this week it was limited to people caught near the border shortly after crossing. Now it applies anywhere in the United States, to anyone who cannot prove they have been here continuously for more than two years.

There is technically a protection: if you can prove you've been here more than two years, you cannot be expeditiously removed. But the court also ruled that ICE officers are not required to tell you this. You must assert it yourself — immediately, under pressure, often without a lawyer present. People who have lived here for decades have already been wrongly deported under this policy. The court acknowledged the errors. It decided they were the fault of individual officers, not the policy itself.

What this adds up to is something we need to name clearly.

Due process — the right to a hearing, the right to contest government action before a neutral judge — has been shredded for immigrants. And the erosion doesn't stop there. When the government claims the power to arrest, detain, and deport people without judicial review, that power can expand. It already has. The question of who it applies to next is not hypothetical.

We used to look at what happened in Minneapolis and think: that is terrible, and it would never happen here. It is terrible. But what is happening now is in some ways more dangerous, because it happens quietly. In compliance traps. At traffic stops. At courthouses. At the prison gate at Berks County Prison, 96 times since the start of the year.

Berks County is not insulated from any of this.

Our partners at ALDEA — the immigrant rights organization that provides legal support to people in our community — are flooded with calls. People who had TPS. People who had been waiting to seek asylum. People who have lived here for years and are now suddenly in no-man's land, wondering whether the protections they counted on still exist.

They don't. Not federally.

Which is exactly why what the Berks County Prison Board does matters so much. Every person handed to ICE by our local jail (96 people since January) enters a system that now has fewer checks, less oversight, and less accountability than it did a week ago. The Prison Board cannot fix what the Supreme Court has done. But it can stop feeding people into that system.

That is what we are asking. That is why we fight.

No ICE in Berks (BOW — Berks Organizing Workgroup) is a nonpartisan community organization working to end Berks County's voluntary cooperation with ICE. Learn more and take action at noiceinberks.org.