Hello again, everyone! I'm Dara; you may recognize me from my last guest stint on this blog. It's good to be back here, and I'd actually like to start off by digging a little deeper into something Adam linked to earlier in the month: a Linda Greenhouse post about the slow erosion of Fourth Amendment rights. The whole post is instructive -- go read it if you missed it the first time -- but I was especially intrigued by the case Greenhouse cites as the beginning of the trend:
The Supreme Court's fantasy world of consensual and constitutionally informed encounters with the police is nothing new. In a 1984 decision, Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Delgado, a case arguably even more relevant today than it was before the immigration crackdown of the later 1980’s and since, the court rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge to immigration sweeps of factories and other workplaces. There was no problem, the court held, because the workers surrounded by immigration agents were not “seized.” They were free to leave the premises, and those who chose to remain participated in nothing more than a “classic consensual encounter.”
Since 1984, of course, the Court has continued to expand the definition of which searches count as "reasonable," culminating in this month's ruling in Kentucky v. King. At the same time -- as Greenhouse notes -- immigration enforcement today doesn't look much like it looked in 1984, either. (Note: I work in immigration, but my thoughts in this post, as always, are entirely my own.) Unsurprisingly, it turns out that in 21st-century workplace raids, workers aren't "free to leave the premises" at all. Here's an account of a wave of raids that happened in December 2006 under the Bush administration, from a United Food and Commercial Workers commission report:
Sister Christine Feagan, director of Hispanic ministries at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Marshalltown, Iowa, arrived at the Marshalltown plant shortly after the raid there began. She described for the Commission what she saw: armed ICE agents were stationed on the roof of the plant, "watching vigilantly so that no one could leave the immediate grounds without being detected." ...
Instead of searching out any of the 133 individuals named on the arrest warrants, heavily armed ICE agents fanned out through each of the affected plants, sealed the exits, and ordered all the workers into lines where they were patted down and searched for weapons. After the weapons search, witnesses testified to the Commission that ICE agents herded workers en masse into the plant cafeterias or other holding areas and divided them by race and national origin. ICE agents prohibited workers from leaving the area, and forbade them from using their cell phones or otherwise communicating with the outside world. Many people were denied food or water or the right to use the bathroom and some were handcuffed. ICE failed to advise anyone of their legal rights and allowed no one access to legal representation at the raid site though attorneys were right outside, available and willing to assist. The reality of the workers' captivity was driven home when ICE fired shots after someone attempted to leave the Greeley plant.(emphasis in the original)
These are the sorts of aggressive, militaristic immigration tactics that President Obama's DHS has made a point of moving away from -- at least rhetorically -- by talking about "smart" and "targeted" enforcement. In fact, the administration claims it's stopped conducting physical workplace raids entirely. (Instead, they say, they're increasing the number of paperwork-based "silent raids.") Immigration restrictionists don't like this at all, of course, and the first hearing Republicans held when they gained control of the Immigration Subcommittee in January was about the need for workplace raids. Unfortunately, however, the Republican outrage is misguided. The Obama administration is still conducting workplace raids after all, most recently at a construction site in Odessa, Texas.
The Tuscany at Faudree apartments, 4001 Faudree Road, was surrounded by Odessa police and Midland County sheriff's deputies, as well as at least one K-9 unit from the Andrews County sheriff's office...
A helicopter circled the air above the apartment and nearby fields for more than half an hour, apparently looking for anyone who might have escaped the perimeter of what an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman from El Paso confirmed was a search warrant executed by their agents.
The article excerpted above quotes one of the workers detained, then released, in the raid, who says that while previous raids allowed workers to go inside a nearby building, "now [agents] check every room." There may not be snipers perched on the roofs to shoot attempted escapees, but I don't know that even this Supreme Court would call the Odessa raid a "classic consensual encounter." At some point between 1984 and today, the Supreme Court's justification for allowing workplace raids became irrelevant to the raids themselves; INS v. Delgado's legacy today is its role in the quiet raids on everyone's Fourth Amendment rights.
