Immigration Judicial Warrants Don't Exist
Time to pull the sanctuary jurisdiction fig leaf
By Andrew R. Arthur on September 17, 2019
Of late, I have written a number of posts about sanctuary policies issued by jurisdictions that deny that they are sanctuaries. Part of their shtick is to assert that they would comply with detainer requests that are accompanied by "judicial warrants". Of course in the immigration context, there is no such thing.
In this blog, I borrow freely from my colleague Dan Cadman, who wrote about a similar issue in July 2018. The points that Cadman made remain relevant, and bear repeating.
But first, the contentions. One of the sanctuary policies (and probably one of the worst ones I've ever heard of) comes out of Montgomery County, Md. It includes the following: "Immigration detainers, that are not accompanied by judicial warrants, are civil detainers for which the federal government bears sole responsibility." I have no idea why the extra commas were included in that sentence, nor what exactly "sole responsibility" consists of. Immigration detainers are, however, civil detainers, because immigration proceedings are civil — as opposed to criminal — in nature. Immigration detention is, however, detention, and the authority for such detention has been recognized as valid since the 19th Century.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Immigration-Judicial-Warrants-Dont-Exist
