Worst Supreme Court Since Taney

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that immigrants, even those with permanent legal status and asylum seekers, do not have the right to periodic bond hearings. – NPR

And so, legal immigrants, at least who have not been naturalized, may now be detained indefinitely without trial. Soon it will be naturalized citizens (ICE already claims the right to revoke naturalization), and then perhaps then natural citizens.

The bail questions before us are technical but at heart they are simple. We need only recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, in particular its insistence that all men and women have “certain unalienable Rights,” and that among them is the right to “Liberty.” We need merely remember that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause protects each person’s liberty from arbitrary deprivation. And we need just keep in mind the fact that, since Blackstone’s time and long before, liberty has included the right of a confined person to seek release on bail. It is neither technical nor unusually difficult to read the words of these statutes as consistent with this basic right. I would find it far more difficult, indeed, I would find it alarming, to believe that Congress wrote these statutory words in order to put thousands of individuals at risk of lengthy confinement all within the United States but all without hope of bail. I would read the statutory words as consistent with, indeed as requiring protection of, the basic right to seek bail. — Supreme Court opinion in Jennings v. Rodriquez, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, dissenting.

We now live in a country where people can be disappeared. The door is wide open to a police state.