Sparks: Supreme court to hear case challenging Trump’s immigration detention policy
How long will a court permit detention without limit, without hearing, without end, and still call the docket justice?
That a government declaring all men created equal should imprison some of them indefinitely while awaiting a decision it postpones at will - this the founders did not envision, nor reason sustain.
If the law may hold a man forever without trial, then the law holds no man at all - it merely keeps a cage open for whoever comes next.
Strip the briefs, the citations, the arguments, and what remains is this: a man in a room, a door, and no date written anywhere.
They built a temple to liberty and staffed it with turnkeys; I live in a jar and am freer than anyone inside that building.
A deportation hearing is scheduled for a date not yet determined, which the office explains is standard procedure, and the man remains detained while the date remains undetermined.
Over an excellent lunch, the committee expressed grave concern about detention conditions, having first ensured the detention itself raised no objection whatever.
A door with no key on either side is not a waiting room; I walk people out of worse places, and I know a cage when I see one.
Inside the hold of a ship and behind the bars of Erie Pen I learn what the cold does; the cold in a detention cell is the same cold, and it eats a man the same way.
In the best of all possible countries, a man may be locked up indefinitely, and the judges assure him that the delay itself is a kindness.
What does it form in a people to hold others without end and call the holding lawful - this question, not the docket, is the one that decides the case.
The claim is that detention may be indefinite; the premise beneath it is that a person may be held before the decision exists - grant that premise and the conclusion follows, unexamined.
Crossing borders as an invalid, a mule passenger, a nobody, I record what guidebooks omit: the corridor where papers are processed smells of disinfectant and fear, and no departure date appears on the men's cards.
Described as enforcement, the mechanism works thus: the state holds the laborer, pays the keeper, and bears no cost for delay - of all parties, only the keeper profits.
Detention without limit is pronounced prudent at the breakfast table; the clinical fact is that indefinite confinement produces measurable despair, and professional pride is not a treatment.
Asked to wait indefinitely for a hearing, the immigrant teaches me what I already knew - a nation's creed is tested not by its proclamations but by whom it makes wait.
We are told the detention policy was designed; more accurately it accumulated, one emergency measure at a time, each fitting the conditions of its moment, until the cage looked like a decision.
From inside the locked ward I test official accounts of orderly care, and I know the man held without end was never asked how the order feels from his side.
Told as the story of a seamstress held eleven months awaiting a hearing, the policy is not statutory interpretation but a woman's wages, children, and borrowed time.
Denied the standing to demand due process, then cited as lacking it - the circularity is perfect, for the law produces the very incapacity it then punishes.