Not content to be fueled by the screams of children, ICE has opened up an offensive in New York over the last couple weeks, harassing people of color throughout the city by demanding papers from completely legal residents doing nothing suspicious at all. Just another disturbing turn in the city where ICE just out of the blue stripped detainees of the right to appear in-person at their deportation hearings. It’s why people in this city are rapidly getting behind the call to abolish ICE.[1]
But the collateral damage of ICE’s jackboot thuggery has finally hit Biglaw where it hurts. To be fair, Biglaw was already in this fight for justice, but this anecdote just personalizes it a bit.
Apparently in the last couple of weeks, ICE agents in Midtown hassled a driver waiting for a passenger at 4 Times Square, demanding his Taxi and Limousine Commission license (which should end the inquiry, because you have to have documented legal status to have one), driver’s license, and the car’s registration and ordered him to stay there until they came back. An hour later, according to reports, the driver walked to the NYPD kiosk in the area to seek help and the officer at the desk gave him back all the documents, explaining that ICE dropped them off with him and just left. It seems they never intended to let the guy off the hook once they realized they were harassing an innocent man.
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But as you might have guessed from the “4 Times Square” part of the story, this unjustified hour-long stop stranded a Skadden partner waiting to be taken to court. The partner was reportedly furious over the whole affair, which is understandable both on a personal level and as someone who took a Con Law class at least once in their life and knew this shouldn’t be happening in America.
The title above isn’t meant to diminish what the driver went through. It’s traumatic when a guy who did everything right and was just minding his own business still experiences arbitrary and capricious intimidation. But it highlights how this “law enforcement” effort is doing a disservice to everyone in the country right now. When Biglaw’s business is getting disrupted by some civil service exam reject making an unjustified stop, it should make even the fence-sitters question whether ICE — and all the resources we’re dumping into it — is serving any useful purpose out there.
They should have wondered that when the screaming kids happened, but everyone has a different breaking point.
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[1] Despite the hyperventilation out of conservative news outlets, abolishing ICE does not mean “open borders” because ICE isn’t the nation’s border control agency. That would be CBP. It shouldn’t be that difficult to grasp, as the latter agency has the word “border” in its name, but here we are. ICE, on the other hand, is a paramilitary group of wannabes who tear ass around the country harassing minorities in the off chance that they might be immigrants.
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.