Has anyone been acquitted for battering an ICE agent because they were unidentified attackers?
People keep saying, “Why aren’t the courts doing anything about ICE?”
They are.
Federal courts have ruled thousands of times that ICE unlawfully detained people. Reuters reported that judges have found ICE illegally jailed individuals more than 4,400 times. There are also multiple active lawsuits alleging excessive force, denial of medical care, abusive detention conditions, and unconstitutional arrests.
The problem isn’t that the courts aren’t ruling against ICE. The problem is that many of these rulings apply to individual cases or specific jurisdictions rather than creating nationwide policy. Critics argue that ICE has continued many of the same practices despite repeated adverse court decisions.
Those are two very different issues. One is whether the judiciary is checking ICE’s conduct. The other is whether ICE is consistently changing its behavior in response to those rulings.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Specifically acquitted, no.
I couldn’t find a case where someone was acquitted specifically because they fought an unidentified or plainclothes ICE agent. If that had happened, it’d probably be a pretty high-profile precedent.
What I did find were multiple cases where charges were dropped, people were released, or courts ruled against ICE after video evidence contradicted the agents’ version of events or judges found the arrests or detention were unlawful.
So it’s not true that the courts are just rubber-stamping everything ICE does. They’re ruling against ICE all the time. The bigger issue is that many of those rulings are case-specific and don’t automatically change ICE’s practices nationwide.
Those are two very different questions.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I’m also interested in this second question.
Are courts actually doing anything to stop ICE, or just awarding damages with taxpayer money? Dropped charges won’t help if you’re in a Salvadoran death camp.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 days ago
A lot of our constitutional protections still apply and are still being enforced. For example, when an immigrant is arrested, the government is now required to provide a probable cause hearing, something that was not consistently happening at the beginning. As far as I can tell, people are being released when a court determines that their arrest was unlawful or unsupported by probable cause.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a complete shit show. My point is that it isn’t simply lawlessness. There are still legal safeguards in place, and people are challenging abuses in court. That doesn’t change my view that what we’re doing is wrong.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 days ago
So the US justice system is utterly toothless and ineffective and may as well essentially not exist.
justastranger@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
The US Justice System was recently handicapped by banning Federal appeals court rulings from being applied nationwide. As a result, the compromised and corrupt Supreme Court is the one and only court in the entire nation that’s allowed to make a nationwide ruling.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This is a misleading characterization of what actually happened.
The Supreme Court did not ban federal appeals courts from issuing rulings that apply throughout their circuits, nor did it declare that only the Supreme Court can make decisions with broad legal effect.
What the Court addressed was the use of nationwide (universal) injunctions, where a single district judge blocks a federal policy across the entire country before the case has fully worked its way through the courts. Those are not the same thing as appellate court precedents.
The practical effect is that different circuits may reach different conclusions until the Supreme Court resolves the conflict. That’s how the federal judicial system has traditionally functioned. Appeals court decisions are still binding within their own circuits and continue to shape the law.
If you want to argue that limiting nationwide injunctions is a bad policy, that’s a legitimate position. But saying the decision “banned federal appeals court rulings from being applied nationwide” or made the Supreme Court “the only court allowed to make nationwide rulings” is inaccurate. It conflates two different legal concepts to support a broader political narrative.
someone@lemmy.today 1 day ago
This grossly mischaracterizes things.
The defining feature of the US Court system is how slow it is. We are talking about federal policies that are corrupt, racist, and unconstitutional.
The legal concepts are effectively the same because without nationwide injunctions, there is no mechanism to stop corrupt policy.
The Supreme Court declines to hear most cases, they cherry pick what they want to review, and occasionally when there is a large clear conflict between circuits then it means the Supreme Court may decide to hear the case in a year while harm is ongoing.
You’re saying appeals courts are still binding on their own circuits, but we are talking about federal nationwide policy and executive branch that just ignores rulings unless there is enforcement.
The correct way for this to have proceeded previously was for a federal appellate court to rule it’s unconstitutional to randomly harass people on the street because it violates the 4th Amendment without probable cause, rule it’s an ongoing pattern and they keep ignoring the law and so a simple legal instruction is insufficient, and the instruct the federal marshals to seize ice infrastructure, their computers and phones in DC, and destroy them, and then to stay the order while it gets an emergency appeal, forcing the Supreme Court to rule on this.
But the Supreme Court doesn’t even have to rule on these issues now. The federal courts are powerless to do anything and the Supreme Court declines to hear it. Also, the Supreme Court held racism was a valid reason for detaining people, so ICE agents are fully allowed to randomly harass, detain, threaten and subdue people who are not white or not black, because that’s what these racist MAGA hicks want: they want a reduction in brown people, and they know they can’t easily harass and kill black people anymore, so they are just going after brown people instead.
Let’s just call it what it is: racist white people don’t like so many Latinos and other brown skinned people, they have noticed that white people are a smaller portion of the USA and white people are having fewer children, so they have enacted racist policies and elected a corrupt Supreme Court and selected a racist government in power to find ways to change this.
To pretend that the federal courts still have some sort of power in this situation is intellectually dishonest and mischaracterizes what is going on. In theory, decisions are binding on lower courts still. But what does it matter? Does a court matter if no one listens to it and then its power is taken away?
The racist MAGA hicks made a calculation that they could come into power, enact laws that would have previously been deemed illegal, pack the courts with conservatives, and start a campaign to reduce the brown population of the USA and also that liberals and brown people would not take up arms and try to physically stop them. And that calculation was right. Liberals are notoriously anti-gun, anti-gun ownership, and for extreme gun regulations; they are also the party of civility. So… MAGA was right.
What happens when things change and liberals come into power? Will there be hearings? A tribunal? The Supreme Court has sanctioned all of this under racist, intellectually dishonest language and so on what grounds can people be punished for evil? There are no grounds unless there’s a Constitutional amendment. It won’t happen. Even today, eminent domain is being used to seize land for data centers while black people never got their 40 acres or their mule. The horrible truth is MAGA got away with it and will get away with it. Liberals do not have the audacity and courage, nor the voting numbers, to do anything of substance.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But all SCOTUS has to do is simply decline to hear a case in order to prevent nationwide injunctions on clearly-illegal activities.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 days ago
As opposed to yours? In the UK? Seriously?
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Yeah I’m not going to take any kind of back talk from a culture that invented cheese in a can.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Mocking America over spray cheese is like mocking Britain over jellied eels or mushy peas. Every country has novelty foods. Spray cheese is a niche convenience product, not the defining feature of American cuisine.
But sure, yes of course. we invented spray cheese.
And you’ll take all the back tall I give you since you just read every word I wrote.
eestileib@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I’m figuring that people in the UK are plenty aware that things are fucked.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Right, I’m sure they are. Which is exactly why “fuck you, America” is such a bullshit thing to say. If you’re going to paint an entire country with one brush, don’t be surprised when people push back.
And yeah, I’m going to say “fuck you” right back to anyone who says it especially if they live in a politically dysfunctional country just like mine.
The movement someone from Iceland or New Zealand gets in on the conversation I’ll concede my points.