By Steve Levy
How many times have we heard left-leaning Democrats and their allies in the media claiming that illegal aliens are being denied due process when arrested without a judicial warrant? The problem with this line is that it is not now, nor has it ever been, a requirement that a judicial warrant be issued before an illegal alien can be detained or deported.
A judicial warrant is just as it sounds — a warrant issued by a judge sitting on a bench.
An administrative warrant is a warrant issued by an administrator within the Department of Homeland Security or Border Patrol.
It has never been the case in America that a judicial warrant was needed to detain an illegal alien. The law, as originally written and enforced for decades, is that illegal aliens can indeed be detained with a warrant issued by the overseers within the department.
When the left claims that illegal aliens are required to have the same due process as American citizens, this is where they fall flat. The administrative warrant is their due process.
Note that this only pertains to detaining and deporting illegal aliens for the offense of being in the country illegally. It does not pertain to situations where the migrant is on trial for a crime in which he may, at its conclusion, be sentenced to incarceration.
In those cases, due process indeed requires that the illegal alien have the same constitutional rights to a speedy trial and a trial before a jury.
But for those cases dealing merely with deportation, Democratic and Republican administrations alike deported these individuals via the administrative warrant.
But the Democrats in Congress want to change this and are creating the false narrative that, unless there’s a judicial warrant issued, ICE and border officials can do nothing, or they will be violating the due process rights of the illegal alien. It’s false and they know it. Yet, they are promoting this claptrap to create sympathy within the public and paint a narrative that ICE is acting cruelly, illegally and violating the Constitution.
More significantly, as expressed in a Washington Examiner article, the Democrats’ judicial warrant requirement is a backdoor amnesty. This effort is deliberately designed to make it impossible for ICE and border patrol to deport anyone.
As noted many times before in this column, the opening of our border by then-President Joe Biden and Democrats was done deliberately to increase the number of illegal aliens who can be counted in the census in blue states and cities, thereby bolstering the number of blue congressional districts, and electoral votes from Democratic-controlled states. Democrats saw this as a lifeline after so many citizens were fleeing blue states toward less expensive and more open red states.
All this is noted in Peter Schweitzer’s brilliant book, The Invisible Coup, which details how the far left, including socialists, are counting on these imported immigrants to help them create a Marxist state here in America and overthrow our free market system.
We have seen too many editorials, newspaper articles, and comments from the public parrot this false narrative that the rights of illegal aliens are being denied when judicial warrants are not issued.
The next time someone tries to feed you the nonsense that judicial warrants are needed for deportation, hit them back with the facts.