The Injustice of Taxpayer-Funded Immigration Defense

Imagine: Carlos Rodriguez enters the United States illegally via the southern border. He accepts illicit employment from a shady employer and never pays taxes. The IRS does not even know that he is in the country. He is paid in cash and he keeps his funds in his apartment, periodically sending some back to Honduras via Western Union transfers.

Within a year, Carlos gets criminally charged with battery. Under the current administration, ICE lodges a detainer so that they can prevent him from being released back onto American streets. He is provided with a free lawyer to defend against the battery charge. According to a proposed law in California, he will also be provided with a free legal defense in immigration court—even though he never held legal status in the United States.

Under Assembly Bill 2600, taxpayer funds would pay for immigration defense attorneys for those facing deportation. It represents a perverse redistribution of resources away from the innocent, and is inherently contrary to justice. It completely disregards the rights of Americans for the direct benefit of lawbreakers.

Remember: Most American citizens do not just pay taxes into the system themselves, but they have for generations. So, when an American has need of the social safety net, he is collecting on what he and his forebears have been paying into throughout their lifetimes. This cannot be said for immigrants without legal status.

It is already the case that illegal immigrants who commit criminal acts and are prosecuted in U.S. courts are given free access to a legal defense. Hence, those who have committed serious crimes on American soil are burdensome in overlapping ways—they harm the Americans who are the victims of their crimes, then they harm the country economically too. Criminal legal defenses are not minor costs. This is one reason to enforce immigration laws before waiting to see what other laws are broken thereafter.

Immigration law has historically been kept distinct from criminal law in part because we do not wish to provide attorneys free-of-charge as soon as anyone crosses the border. An immigrant does not risk long-term incarceration and thus the loss of years of his life in custody over immigration claims, for he can usually simply return to his home country. The new proposal is not just absurd, it’s harmful to other immigrants who have legitimate claims in already clogged immigration courts.

Remember that the Trump Administration is continuing to prioritize cases like the hypothetical case of Carlos, in which the individual not only broke immigration law by entering the country illegally, but further committed criminal offenses thereafter. The majority of ICE arrests are of those who have criminal records, yet have been ignored by prior administrations. (The other arrests typically take place because criminal illegal aliens are living with other illegals who have not committed further criminal acts, so both groups get swept up in the same ICE raids.) The majority of Americans support the deportations of immigrants who hold criminal records, which is why it was a priority of the Trump Administration.

This Californian proposal makes victims of the innocent under the faux auspices of “compassion:”

• The Americans who have paid into the system will suffer instead of those who have committed numerous crimes.

• Legal immigrants will have their cases delayed due to the over-burdened immigration system.

• The immigration detention centers will suffer further overcrowding as unnecessary delays are placed on simple deportation cases.

• Delays in immigration processing will keep harmful immigrants in the country longer, posing a risk to the American people. An at-capacity system will start releasing immigrants back into communities because of lack of ability to hold them.

At its core, this is an intentional effort to prevent the rapid deportation of those who have no grounds to be in the United States, likely in the hopes of waiting until another presidency that returns to the status quo of ignoring the net effects of unchecked mass immigration.

Meanwhile, there is a very real human toll. It is easy to forget the people whose lives are upended by immigrant violence. The North Carolina man who was sodomized and tortured by two illegals in a home invasion in February has not “moved on” just because the news cycle did. It will be with him forever. Fifteen-year-old Miles Young was murdered by an illegal alien in March. He cannot move on, and neither can his family. So when people pontificate about the supposed compassion of keeping illegals in the country for longer, they tread on the memory of the victims who have suffered unnecessarily.

We can treat people humanely while recognizing what is just, enforcing borders and existing laws, and prioritizing the innocent. When we make idols of a criminal class, we make victims of the upright.