Subject: Re: Government deported a U.S. citizen with no process
How do you know this wasn't answered?

Because her daughter is less than a year old. When the mother had her last hearing, she hadn't yet been born.

That's *your* argument, not mine. I'm not the one saying, "Don't deport this woman, she's lived a clean life", you are.

There's two arguments here.

The first is the due process argument, which deals not with final outcomes but with process. That argument isn't about addressing whether this woman will ultimately be deported, but whether she is given fair treatment in getting to that point. It is in no way a fair process for her or her daughter for her to be denied more than a bare moment to confer with her husband or an attorney about what to do with her daughter. There's no reason at all that this needed to happen so quickly.

The second is enforcement priorities, and you're exactly right in identifying this as a key factor:

Again, there's really only 1 penalty for illegal entry and that's to be sent out across the border. In that sense it's different from our bank robbing scenario because the judge has discretion in what to sentence me more - I could pay restitution, I could do community service, I could serve 1 year or I could serve 20 at hard labor. All the extenuating circumstances you're arguing are in the play there because there is a Pain Knob on the potential punishment. Shoot, the government could even charge me some other kind of crime.

But in deportation cases you're either here illegally and subject to deportation or you've been granted some kind of reprieve. There's no public service or parole or some other kind of option available.

When there's only one penalty, and it's a really extreme penalty, the need for mercy and leniency and "making the punishment fit the crime" doesn't go away. It just gets folded into the binary decision of whether to impose that penalty or not. And that does happen, and it's part of law enforcement too.

One obvious example of that in criminal law enforcement is sexual encounters between teenagers in the 20 or so states that don't have "Romeo and Juliet" laws. In those states, if two teenagers have consensual sexual relations, they are both committing statutory rape. Under the law both should be prosecuted, go to jail, and register as sex offenders. But that never happens (or happens so rarely as to be all but unknown). We know that those states are filled with pretty much just as many teenagers having sexual encounters as any other state, but you never see a prosecutor put two seventeen-year-olds in prison for years for consensually messing around. They don't prosecute or enforce against the cases where it's still technically illegal but the people aren't bad people for doing it, and they do prosecute heavily where the act is no less illegal but far more contemptible.

It also gets folded into the concept of humanitarian parole, which is part of immigration law as well. Because the binary "banish or remain" penalty is so harsh, you can be granted a temporary reprieve from deportation if deporting you right then would result in terrible consequences with no public benefit.

So at a minimum, this woman should have had the opportunity to seek a humanitarian parole of limited time - perhaps only weeks - to allow her to make the appropriate arrangements to minimize the damage to her daughter (and perhaps prevent an American citizen from having to grow up under a dictator).