2 weeks Ago
Our felonious President Trump announced plans to use Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to create a mass detention facility for up to 30,000 “criminal aliens.” He said that some are “so bad, we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.” Guantanamo has a troubled history of the denial of due process to the detainees held there, some without charges for years.
It is a blight on our nation. Now an administration filled with felons is going to ignore the Constitution and its Due Process and Equal Protection clauses, which have been broadly interpreted to include everyone regardless of race, nation of origin, immigration status or any other defining characteristic, to place people there indefinitely — who, exactly, and under what circumstances, he didn’t say. If an undocumented immigrant commits a crime in the United States, they are subject to the same laws as citizens.
They face the same judicial system and consequences. Statistics show, however, that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than U.S.
-born citizens. Using incarceration rates as a proxy for crime, a team of economists at Northwestern University analyzed 150 years of U.S.
Census data and found immigrants were consistently less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S. Furthermore, there is no evidence that deportations reduce crime rates.
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This action is, at best, a blustering threat from a dictator wannabe. At worst, it is the establishment of a flawed substitute for our judicial system. Laurie Churchill, Lincoln Catch the latest in Opinion Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!.
