Zero Tolerance and the Fourteenth Amendment

Guest blogger Rob Baker and I had an oped on the Daily Beast last Saturday, which was the 150th anniversary of the certification of the Fourteenth Amendment.  The piece compares the Trump-Sessions policy of zero tolerance toward border crossers to the SCOTUS opinion in Prigg v. Pennsylvania. Here is the gist:

The Trump administration’s immigration policy appears to be on a collision course with the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was certified 150 years ago today. In the latest episodes of “zero tolerance,” it was just revealed that 700 families have not been reunited despite a court-ordered deadline, while nearly 500 parents have already been summarily deported without their children. While such heartless treatment shocks the conscience, it is the sadly predictable outcome of a strategy that favors administrative expedience over humane values. President Trump himself tweeted that border crossers should be sent back “without judges or court cases,” which recalls a shameful period in our history when a different group of desperate refugees was similarly subjected to immediate removal, with no semblance of due process, under a policy of “zero tolerance.”

Our first wave of illegal crossers comprised asylum seekers from slavery—styled “fugitives from labour” in the bloodless language of the Constitution. Many of them were indeed runaway slaves, but others had valid claims to freedom, including a shocking number of people who had been kidnapped and forced into servitude against even the laws of the slave states. Responding to this horrifying reality, most northern jurisdictions enacted “personal liberty laws” that provided due process protections for people claimed as fugitives. Slaveholders howled in outrage, declaring, just as President Trump has, that it was imperative to immediately “bring them back from where they came.” Eventually the issue came before the Supreme Court of the United States.

The case was Prigg v. Pennsylvania, decided in 1842.

You can read the entire piece here (we did not write the headline).

Comments

[Scott Pruitt Edndowed Chair in Enviconmental Justice]

We should negotiate a grand bargain. If you don't mess with the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 13th, and 14th Amendments, us Snowflakes will leave the Second one alone. I don't get it. The Second Amendment is sacrosanct (except as it relates to African Americans and permitted CC) and everything else is fungible?

[Scott Pruitt Edndowed Chair in Enviconmental Justice]

You should also add the Trail of Tears, and Trump's putative hero Jackson's refusal to enforce the Court's order in Worchester v. Georgia.

[anon]

"Slaveholders howled in outrage, declaring, just as President Trump has, that it was imperative to immediately “bring them back from where they came.”

This sentence qualifies as one of the most if not the most demagogic false and inflammatory claims I have ever read.

The claim of a slaveholder to return a slave is not "Just LIKE" a president saying that persons who enter this country illegally should be deported. It is literally stupid to say any such thing.