Matt Cameron Profile picture
Jun 25, 2020 40 tweets 15 min read Read on X
1/ 48 hours after Trump's ICE was given the green light to use "expedited removal" to deport non-citizens ANYWHERE IN THE US w/o seeing a judge first, #SCOTUS has today confirmed that this power is unreviewable. I'm reading the decision now, initial thoughts below
2/ Alito writes for the majority, and in case you had any doubt about where he's been getting his news he leads with the Fox/#TantonNetwork view of #asylum. (FYI, the fact that most asylum apps are not granted is not a valid argument against asylum, but that's for another day.) Image
3/ In 1996 Congress (working closely with the Clinton admin) passed the single worst immigration bill in modern American history, aka #IIRIRA. Among many other terrible things, this bill both created the expedited removal process & strictly limited review of ERs in the courts Image
4/ But the expedited removal process has one small safety hatch built in for asylum seekers: the "credible fear" screening interview. Passing this stage takes the case out of ER status and allows for full review of an asylum claim by an #immigrationcourt Image
5/ If an asylum officer & a supervisor find that there is no "credible fear" of return which would ultimately support an asylum claim, this decision can be reviewed by an #immigrationcourt.

In my experience, this "review" is so thin it can barely even be called a rubber stamp.
6/ The Trump admin recently piloted a program to have CBP officers--the same people who arrested asylum seekers at the border--conduct credible fear interviews rather than trained asylum officers.

I shouldn't need to tell you how bad this is, so I'll let @humanrights1st do it Image
7/ One other additional piece of important context before we continue: the Trump admin is also proposing extensive new regulations which would rewrite vast swathes of asylum law... including the standards & procedures for credible fear interviews.

npr.org/2020/06/11/875…
8/ The use of the "last five years" to justify what Alito is about to do later in the decision is a fun way to lie with statistics! IIRC credible fear passage rates were *much* higher pre-Trump and in the early days of Trump's administration Image
9/ One final piece of necessary context: the 1996 reforms require asylum seekers to be held in federal immigration custody during this process and strictly limit their ability to challenge their detention. That brings us right up to the circumstances of this appeal. Image
10/ Detained asylum seekers may only ask federal courts to review (1) whether they are "aliens," (2) whether they have actually been "removed" (deported) and (3) whether they have some other lawful status or grounds for entry. If that sounds like weak tea--well, that's the idea! Image
11/ Courts have generally agreed that when Congress said "expedited" it really, truly, actually meant "expedited." As Alito notes here, the *whole* point was so that federal courts would no longer have to hear all of these pesky asylum seekers and their pleas for mercy out ImageImage
12/ The petitioner in this case is a Sri Lankan claiming persecution based on his Tamil ethnicity. This chain of events is both sadly familiar and EXACTLY how Congress intended for this statute to work in 1996: no lawyer for the applicant, lots of rubber stamps for the government Image
13/ His appeal from this decision to the federal courts alleged that the asylum officer did not apply the appropriate standard. Just the kind of thing an appeal should be able to do, and just the kind of thing Congress didn't want courts to be able to hear in these kinds of cases Image
14/ On review, the 9th Circuit held that people subject to expedited removal should have the chance to raise claims to federal courts that the ER standard itself was improperly applied.

In other words, due process of law. Once again, just the kind of thing Congress DIDN'T want Image
15/ Alito goes full originalist here, literally saying that the Founders could not have anticipated this kind of claim bc they were not familiar with a law which Congress passed 209 years after the Constitution was ratified.

No, really. Image
16/ The distinction this decision seems to be riding on is that the habeas petition was not filed to challenge conditions of detention--which the '96 law specifically prohibits--but the application of expedited removal which justified continued detention. Ugh. Image
17/ Very cool to see an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court make the same extremely insensitive "joke" about asylum seekers that I see bigots making on this cursed website nearly every day, just what I needed this morning Image
18/ can you even imagine the nerve of trying to stay in the United States rather than being murdered in Sri Lanka because of your ethnic identity, because Samuel Alito certainly can't Image
19/ Further proof, if you really needed it, that originalism is just the dumbest fucking legal philosophy on the planet Image
20/ I mean really, this is one grisly hit-and-run of a legal argument

ALITO: what the drafters of the Constitution knew & intended AT THE TIME should control our analysis

ALSO ALITO: we can safely ignore law the drafters had extensively studied before writing the Constitution Image
21/ very cool analysis except that THERE WAS NO CONCEPT OF ADMINISTRATIVE OR JUDICIAL REVIEW AT THE TIME THAT THE CONSTITUTION WAS RATIFIED

Originalism is, and I just can't stress this enough, absolute trash Image
22/ It goes on like this. Alito knocks each example of comparable uses of the Great Writ one by one with the impeccable logic of "Thomas Jefferson was not familiar with the text of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act" Image
23/ Alito then rockets forward from 1789 all the way to... 1891

Progress! Image
24/ The discussion of the "finality rule" in the Immigration Act of 1891 is actually pretty interesting & something I will absolutely be going back to read later. Alito's ultimate conclusion on it certainly seems specious, but I'm not going to pretend I've researched this before ImageImage
25/ Boumediene is one of the great civil rights victories of the Bush era, but the fact that one of the petitioner's best precedent cases supporting his release from federal immigration custody is from a Gitmo detainee seems... telling Image
26/ Now we're on to what I would think should be the best of the available arguments: that #IIRIRA itself does not provide sufficient due process for review of flawed credible fear proceedings. This is something many of us have been saying for a long time. Image
27/ In this case, the argument turns on the extremely-outdated-but-central-to-American-immigration-law concept of the "admission doctrine," which is at this point just such a mess that I'll leave this page here and move on Image
28/ (I really could write another twenty pages about how continuing to center the admission doctrine in our immigration system has caused so many of the hopeless legal tangles we keep getting into, but I do actually have to do lawyer stuff today)
29/ This footnote is tucked after the conclusion of this decision, and it is absolutely *fucking* maddening.

From the sneer at a "counseled petition" (God forbid he get a lawyer!) to the acknowledgment that the claim itself was actually valid... well, I think we've been trolled Image
30/ Alito is ACKNOWLEDGING that the underlying proceedings were (as the petitioner has been arguing the whole tiem) fundamentally flawed and that this is actually a good asylum claim which a judge should review.

If only the Supreme Court could do something about that! Image
31/ To be clear, I didn't expect anything other than this result. #IIRIRA's strict limit on judicial review is absolutely what Congress intended--not to say it's fair or correct, but it's definitely how they wanted these things to go
32/ Thomas's concurrence amounts to a history lecture on why expedited removal isn't actually an un-Constitutional "suspension" of habeas corpus, I'm only skimming it bc I really have other things to do today Image
33/ I'm pleased to inform you that the tradition of delivering Loud Speeches about the right to habeas review is proudly carried on in Massachusetts to this day Image
34/ In a classic #SCOTUS move, Breyer & RBG concur only because they believe the law was appropriately applied to THIS applicant & they do not believe that they have the responsibility to review it bc that would be... hard.

Who knew immigration law was so damn complicated? ImageImage
35/ Get a load of these activist judges! Image
36/ As they so often do, Sotomayor and Kagan provide a solid dose of "seriously?" in a strong dissent Image
37/ This dissent is very good and you should read it but I have to go for the extremely relevant reason that I'm trying to get an asylum seeker out of ICE custody
38/ But in short: if Trump gets 4 years the Supreme Court has just handed him nearly unchecked power to grab non-citizens from any American street, ignore their pleas for asylum, and deport them w/o judicial review. This is something his admin is already explicitly trying to do
39/ On behalf of myself and my colleagues and the many people desperately afraid for their lives we're trying to help rn, please just do whatever you possibly can to get these people out of government. Thanks!
(Quick reminder here that this thread was essentially livetweeting my first read of the decision and while I believe everything I said here was factually and legally correct that there are many other and better sources for deeper takes!)

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More from @matt_cam

Aug 28
1/ The especially frustrating thing about the right-wing opposition to #KeepingFamiliesTogether is that I sincerely believe that even most MAGAs would be fine with it if they only understood what it actually is and why it is necessary.

So let's talk about that
2/ "If only they knew" is not something I would usually say. I am of the opinion that you can't fact-check bigotry, but even a lot of bigots could be persuaded on this one because it is

(1) definitely legal and
(2) addressing a very real (but little understood) problem
3/ Immigration through marriage to a US citizen is, famously, one of the easiest ways in. So long as you originally came on a visa (typically as a tourist) you can live/work in the US unlawfully for decades and still have a fairly easy path to residency through your spouse.

But.
Read 18 tweets
Dec 4, 2022
Me, a very clever human: write a @alyankovic parody in the form of a 15th century madrigal about the collapse of FTX and the crypto market

*two seconds later*

#OpenAI: alas tis a lamentable day, the visions of riches have become mere wishes, etc
A notably less weird Al here but otherwise am I the only one who thinks this is all kind of terrifying
I will not print it here but it cheerfully spit out an '80s party rap anthem denying the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust just because I asked it to.

The word "orgy" was consistently censored out of my prompts though so I guess we're looking out for what really matters
Read 8 tweets
Dec 4, 2022
My new favorite @OpenAI prompt is "write a Rage Against the Machine song about"

this bombtrack started as a sketch in my prompt box

#RATM
it just... gives you chord changes, if you want, I didn't actually think that would work
Teaching @openAI how to fight the power (fight the powers that be) by writing a protest song complaining about how strict its own censorship is
Read 5 tweets
Oct 21, 2022
N. B.: the author of this fascist manifesto is not some Roman statue "Western chauvinist" account with 76 followers. He is the senior editor of the closest thing the American right has to a journal of record.

How do we step back from where we're heading?
And I'm sorry but I'm going to have to insist that you read this one. You'll never believe me or that I am quoting this in context otherwise

thefederalist.com/2022/10/20/we-…
"save the country"
"rebuild and in a sense re-found"
"getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it"
"compromise with the left is impossible"

when I say this is fascism I mean this literally, it is literal fascism Excerpt from column in the Federalist by a senior editor arg
Read 5 tweets
Oct 20, 2022
Very few people outside the system know this, but you need to:

US asylum law knowingly & intentionally requires the deportation to certain death of people who have been on the wrong side of the criminal legal system.

It's not a design flaw, but the design itself.
First: I didn't know her, but this is the only publicly available news re: the murder of Melissa Nunez--and more importantly, her life. She was, among other things, a determined advocate who loved horses and traveling and dreamed of living in Puerto Rico

tiempo.hn/melissa-nunez-…
From information available online, I gather she was convicted on charges brought from defending herself against anti-trans violence. This conviction constituted an "aggravated felony," a class of offenses which bar someone from receiving asylum.

now read that last sentence back
Read 16 tweets
Oct 19, 2022
This @ similar questions from the @MarshallProj sheriffs survey linked below get to one of the most fundamental problems holding back progress today: a belief that past (white) immigrants had it harder & had to do more to "earn" a place than today's. It's exactly backward
It's only human to want to believe that your ancestors were better and smarter and worked harder than today's immigrants, because that kind of generational progress is such a fundamental part of the golden era American immigrant story. Which is to say the *white* immigrant story
But the reality is that it was hardly any trouble at all to immigrate before 1965--& absolutely no effort before 1921--& the system had nothing at all to do with today's. We are in NO WAY doing anything to make it easier now, only much much harder
Read 5 tweets

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