ICE’s aggressive enforcement actions in Minneapolis and elsewhere across the country have prompted an expected surge in lawsuits. We are learning a lot about the inner workings of this current wave of immigration enforcement through these lawsuits, as well as how seriously the administration responds to legal challenges. New court filings from a lawsuit in Minnesota raise major concerns about our government’s commitment to due process and, as you will see, basic math.
Let’s start with some background to the case I’m talking about. Juan Tobay Robles is an Ecuadorian national who entered the country as a child and who was arrested during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis on January 8 (the day after Renee Good was killed). His lawyers challenged his detention through what is called a habeas corpus petition or habeas petition—basically, a request that a judge review the lawfulness of a detention and, if found unlawful, order the person released.
You may have heard of this in the news recently, because earlier this month, ProPublica found that habeas lawsuits are at historic highs right now, coinciding with ICE’s deluge of enforcement across the country. That makes sense; I found a similar spike in habeas cases at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as ICE’s detention centers became dangerous Petri dishes for infection.
But habeas corpus is not a new idea. Habeas corpus is one of the oldest concepts in the Western legal tradition, a principle that legal scholars typically trace back to the Magna Carta in 1215 and which has become generalized, in various forms, in constitutions around the world, including the U.S. Constitution. At the core of habeas corpus is the idea that people who are arrested and detained by their government should have the opportunity to appear in court and challenge their detention. It is a foundational principle of due process and one of our most basic, sacred checks on expansive police powers and authoritarian overreach.¹ No king and, in a democracy, no president should have the unlimited ability to lock people up without justification and in violation of the law. Instead, courts may issue a writ of habeas corpus that compels the state to (literally) habeas corpus (i.e., “produce the body”) to the court so that that person may speak to charges against them.