The Fourth
I was going to write about the H1B controversy this week, but then a story broke that requires attention. The Trump regime disappeared 1,200 souls from an extrajudicial terror camp in a Florida swamp. From my non-lawyer perspective, this violates the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution which opens with the clause, “right of the people to be secure in their persons.”
Back in March, I studied the Bill of Rights for the first time in my adult life. I did this far away from the nation-building exercises of public school that I was bred into during the last quarter of the 20th century. I knew some of them, but I didn’t remember what all of them said. Furthermore, most of them were so dense with legalese, that my childhood brain simply did not have the experience to comprehend the words. So I revisited the amendments and gravitated to the Fourth.
The full text reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Fast forward to late September. A report surfaces that the Trump regime disappeared 1,200 souls from an extrajudicial terror camp in a Florida swamp. If you are scared reading that sentence, then I argue that you have a Fourth Amendment violation claim against current occupiers of US Federal Government buildings and offices. The acts of the occupying mob violate your right to feel safe in your person, and you should be speaking up for yourself. No one is coming to save you.
It’s not lost on me that the heavy hand of federal overreach has always lorded itself over the most marginalized communities. We are a country built on slave labor. It’s important to understand this in full. And these fear-inducing tactics are born out of the days when it was legal to own and sell people for profit. What changed is the application of the tactics. For decades, the number of people subjected to these terrorist attacks had been significantly decreased. Progress has been made by advocates of intervention-based law enforcement over the traditional incarceration-based approach.
Now that the aperture of the scope through which the occupiers look to find their next victims has been opened wider, the question still sits unanswered. In spite of all the talk therapy produced between my keyboard and chair, the two elephants in the room are; why did a federal court stop the order to close the terror camp, and what happened to these 1,200 souls?