I don’t disagree. I was just couching it in terms the reThuglicans might understand. They care for citizens. They think anyone who isn’t a citizen is subhuman.
If I were to skew it to specifically your bias, @FFabian, I’d have said something like “newborn cherub who definitely didn’t get born in the USA, since @FFabian hates America, and can’t differentiate between Americans and their government.”
US Americans vote for their government… democracy and stuff.
It’s more complicated than that, and you know it.
You’re playing dumb if you think the USA is a direct democracy. It’s a republic. And there’s quite a few appointed positions of power, and in anycase, people lie and we have to wait four years to fix that. Even if the liar is completely transparent and managed to either fool a bunch of morons, or attract a hoard of psychopaths and sociopaths.
The US isn’t like England. We only have the two parties to choose a winner from.
I may be smart enough to have seen that tRump and dubbya were fucking evil retards, but a lot of people think that they should be governed by people they can drink a beer with. Not someone who actually can do a good job and who has a track record of doing a good job for everyone.
in other words “Uuuuuuh, I dunno how my government works”.
You have as much understanding of my government as a tRump voter as far as I’m concerned.
You vote for yours, right? Well, has it been completely poisoned by anti-intellectualism and a hatred for qualified individuals?
Well put - So what I said basically.
So, you would say we deserve tRump?
That’s not how statutes of limitations work.
Aah, beautiful Centreville, Alabama.
I’ve been there once, looked at it. I too got dumped in rural Alabama.
As a prisoner of ICE you may enter town inside of an aluminum box, measuring 4’/8’/4’, together with six other “undocumented” individuals, bodies pressed together tightly, their extremities interlocking, some of whom may have passed out from the stress and heat, have rapid, shallow breathing, dry, hot skin, can not be woken up even while they are vomiting. The women are in a separate box.
The boxes would be on the floor of an unmarked white van’s un-air conditioned cargo hold, the catalyst making part of its floor too hot to touch. It is difficult to hold the unconscious aliens off the ground without receiving burns yourself.
The alu-box has coin-sized holes, as mandated for the humane transport of animals. Through these holes you may look up in a steep angle, at the moving van’s windows, dots of deep blue and cloudless August sky. Dixieland Summer sky. All day.
You will not be supplied food, water, bathrooms or humanity between Hotlanta and rural Alabama.
The driver seemingly doesn’t get to take a bathroom break either. When he does stop the van, he gets out of the cab, opens the sliding door some, and gets back into the air conditioned driver cab, keeping the engine running.
The ■■■■■ (MoіSΤ) air coming in feels almost refreshing at first.
For an hour or so you’d peer through your coin-sized hole across a vast deserted parking lot at a distant Walmart wafting and flickering in inferior mirages.
The floor above the exhaust and catalyst got so hot that you could feel the infrared radiation on your face.
Those who had no choice but to have a body-part on the floor put several layers of all of our shoes between. It smelled like burned rubber, hot vomit and fear.
Outside of the box and the van, in the humid subtropical climate, the temperature may have been an unbearable 105° to 110 °Fahrenheat (45°C+), inside it was so hot that you could hear your heartbeat rush through your head, so hot your vision would narrow and you tasted metal.
After an hour or so, an identical white van would pull up, a woman would get stuffed into her box, the door closed and a few minutes later we were on our way.
Wet with puke, sweat and tears nobody needed to pee.
You would have no idea where they are taking you. And then you begin to no longer just fear for the life of the already unconscious, but your own.
It is difficult to imagine that this is not a dangerous and unusual situation, that this can be normal, an experience had by many every day. It sure was memorable.
One guy from Brazil helped the general attitude majorly by cheering the others on, encouraging everybody, this would be over soon, he had done this once before. In Portuguese.
Nobody in our international group of travelers spoke more than a few words of English, but we were very close. Not just physically.
Everybody caught the spirit. Obrigado irmão.
You would be on interstates, mostly moving west and south. For hours and hours.
Last night you slept at the coast. This evening if you lived to see it, you would be several states and a timezone away. Unanticipated.
Arriving inside of the jail in Centreville, Alabama, felt like returning into civilization. Cool neon-lit concrete has never looked better and they made the best corn bread I ever ate.
It is also a great place to be released into Freedom™ from.
Any of them are.
Happened just as suddenly. Sweet release.
It fucking took hours until my ride got there. I loved every moment. Used the free time to go ‘sight seeing’.
Few people walk the empty streets that no tourist has ever set foot upon.
They have a monument listing the fallen heroes from one great war or another.
Also there’s a plaque with names of fallen Negroes.
There are also a courthouse and a church. Several churches, obviously.
A town where everybody knows everybody else, and they know they don’t know you.
I couldn’t get the grin out of my face.
I can attest that Centreville was a lovely little town to get the fuck out of in 2003, that I have nothing bad to say about after spending two and a half days there.
Life has never been the same.
And I still wonder if that tiny dark-haired woman survived being Alabamy Bound.
How many people die in custody of ICE?
Why one human being feels the need or right to do harm to complete strangers is beyond my understanding. When another example of such pointless cruelty arises I am left feeling confused and angered at my lack of ability to much about it. I can vote and i do, I can offer kindness or recognition to others and I do, I can talk to people who see no harm in this kind of cruelty and I do. Yet still, it is so little, it is such a grain of sand lying at the foot of a mountain.
I also realize that the capacity to be the jailor dwells in me as it possibly does in all of us. I need to always be aware of that. Still I feel responsibility to make a difference and hardly know where or how to start. It is unlikely that I will ever meet you, less likely that I will know the things that you have experienced. Nothing can take that experience away from you but what can I do to make to help make things change. This is a question I ask for the many of us who likely will not face what happened to you I can not feel guilty about this because then it becomes about me and you. What might give you hope that others care about you.
Finally, thank you for writing about this. It is hard to imagine how that must have felt but your words took me close to a place I would wish on no one. I wish you a life with hope and opportunity.
Not much help if they keep you detained with out a call to your lawyer, or if no friends or family know to report you missing or detained.
Shouldn’t it be an exhaustive list of the government’s powers, instead?
For anyone interested:
The original judgment:
The appeal:
I don’t think relations between the appeal court judges are any too good at the moment…
In a dissent, U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Katzmann skewered his colleagues’ reasoning.
“I would hope that nothing about Watson’s 1,273‐day detention can be said to have been ‘an entirely common state of affairs,’” he wrote. “If it were, we should all be deeply troubled.”
appears to have touched a nerve:
The dissent thrice adverts to this quoted passage, drawing the invalid
inference that the majority deems the multi-year detention of an American citizen
as an “entirely common state of affairs.” Dissent at 1, 15, 18. What is “an entirely
common sate of affairs” is Watson’s 11th-grade education and the corollary that
he lacks knowledge of the law. The dissent would rely on those characteristics to
toll the limitations period. But those characteristics, commonplace for pro se
litigants (and for a substantial segment of the population), are wholly insufficient
to justify the “rare remedy” of equitable tolling. Wallace, 549 U.S. at 396.
footnote 10 to the appeal opinion.
Translation: “he’s just a fucking peasant, what are you whining about?”
that’s okay, English isn’t our official language.
Not at all. The powers of the government may change depending on the will of the people but the limitations placed on those powers requires much more effort to change.
The bill of rights is not a contract and the protections afforded to all people by it are well established by the courts
I love the typo in the original.
To be fair to the judges, they do all agree that it’s a complete disgrace.
The majority just think that the law has been a disgrace in this way for a long time and that they don’t have the power to change it.
If I’ve understood the appeal judgment correctly, that’s sort of where the problem lies.
You can only sue the state for unlawful imprisonment within two years of the date your right to sue accrued. The right accrues when your ‘unlawful’ detention ends.
That can either happen because you are released or if your detention becomes lawful.
According to the majority that happened by November 13, 2008 when a judge ordered his removal, thereby affirming the government’s detention of Mr Watson (it might have happened earlier, they say).
At that point, they conclude, Mr Watson had the opportunity to put his case to a judge who found against him.
That was clearly a wrong decision but it was a decision of a judge acting within his or her powers and therefore providing legal grounds for Mr Watson’s continued detention.
They say that’s the latest point time began to run on his unlawful detention claim. He might have had different claims at that point for malicious prosecution based on the complete clusterfuck by the ICE but his unlawful detention was over.
The fact that he was still in prison and had no idea he could bring a claim or was on a clock is just tough shit that applies to everyone unfortunate enough to be too poor to afford a lawyer and too thick to work it out themselves (I’m paraphrasing slightly at this point - but only slightly).
Chief Judge Katzmann doesn’t agree.
Katzmann argues that the rule stating that unlawful detention comes to an end when you get in front of a judge derives specifically from criminal proceedings which have all sorts of safeguards for the accused built in - safeguards like a right to counsel, etc. which do not apply to immigration proceedings.
Therefore one shouldn’t just take a rule which applies in circumstances where the potential plaintiff would already have access to legal advice and apply it to immigration proceedings where they don’t.
Katzmann is also optimistic enough to think that ICE’s conduct in this case is sufficiently unusually incompetent to justify a court in exercising their discretion to allow a claim out of time.
The majority don’t think so highly of the ICE (again paraphrasing like mad).
No one deserves Trump, not even those who voted for him.
