False imprisonment

So he was thinking, "Yeah, there's a federal hold on me for some weird reason." But of course, he's wondering why they're doing that because you, you'd think you would know, right? So the case will continue on the man's claims that his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights were violated and that he's falsely imprisoned.

False imprisonment is a thing for which you can sue somebody, and, uh, it's quite serious, as you can imagine.

But also due process.

Due process.

And it, it actually takes a while over the time of history for the courts to come around and say, "Yes, all of these, uh, are, are applicable to the states," because I, I've mentioned on this show, on this channel, several years ago, there's a question about whether or not excessive fines levied by the state were a violation of your rights to be protected from excessive fines as described in the Bill of Rights.

You might say, "Well, it's in the Bill of Rights." Yeah, but does the Bill of Rights simply restrict the federal government, or does it also restrict the state government? And believe it or not, the Supreme Court hadn't directly addressed that until relatively recently.

But false imprisonment, yeah, that's been covered for quite some time.

So the 14th Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, and, and you often hear people use those interchangeably or almost always in connection, and if you read a court case, it'll often say they're claiming this right along with the Fifth and the 14th.

Well, I mean, nationally, um, what's significant is, and this is a product of increased enforcement, reduced or elimination of discretion on who will be detained, and then some ICE policies that have turned into BIA precedent that are being litigated.

Um, there's a lot of unlawful detention that's happening in the United States right now, and the goal of habeas is to get a district court to declare that the detention is unlawful.

I looked, and it looks like as of August 11th, there have been 70,000 habeas filed in the United States district courts for immigration cases.

So that's pretty significant.

And in terms of our clientele, I mean, the vast majority of those folks, and it is, there's a lot of different permutations of il- unlawful detentions in our caseloads.

But the vast majority of those folks were, um, subject to this ICE policy that became BIA precedent in matter of Yohuri Hurtado that said anyone who entered the country unlawfully at any time, um, is subject to mandatory detention, in other words, that they don't get the right to a bond hearing.

The Ninth Circuit has said that that policy and that BIA precedent is, is unlawful, um, and I guess what I'd be interested in talking about to some degree is sort of the discussions we've been having within our team about the fact that despite now our clients having access to bond hearings again, the immigration judges are denying bonds with much greater frequency, um, using factors that we've never seen before to find that an individual poses a danger or is, uh, such an extreme risk of flight that no bond can ensure their presence in future immigration hearings.