BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — Constitutional rights when dealing with immigration enforcement
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Stories of immigration enforcement operations continue to pop up nationwide, along with meetings to inform residents of their constitutional rights. Joining us in studio B, local attorney HA Sala, one of three speakers at a community conversation that was held last night at Bakersfield College. Thank you for coming in. I appreciate it.
Sure, good morning.
How did the meeting go?
Uh, it went very well. Uh, it was, uh, broadcast on Zoom as well as live. We had maybe 60-70 individuals live and maybe 80 on Zoom, so it went very well, very informative.
There's a lot out there, you see the videos, you see the ICE agents, and border patrol arresting people out in the community. It looks like a bunch of chaos, but what struck me was that your message was very simplistic to people who are facing this type of situation.
It's very simplistic on two fronts, one. The federal agents have to comply with the law. They have to and should comply with the Constitution. That's not difficult to understand. And two, people should assert their constitutional rights, and I think that will de-escalate a lot of the confrontation that you see because, uh, agents simply have to have, uh, specific facts and they have founded suspicion. Reasonable cause, in other words, to believe that an individual is unlawfully present in the United States before they can detain the individual. It's not hard to understand. It's been the law of the land in the United States for over 50 years.
What also struck me as so simplistic for someone who's facing that, you said, do not answer questions.
It's that simple. You do not have to answer uh any questions posed to you by a federal agent, period, and recently a federal injunction was issued uh by uh the Eastern District. Enjoining federal agents from stopping people without a found suspicion and most importantly, the assertion of a right to remain silent is not grounds for them to, uh, detain an individual.
Now you have mentioned, uh, we talked about this a little bit in the break. There are those going around saying, well, if, uh, if ICE agents or if border patrol were allowed to go into prisons where people have been arrested who are undocumented here and be able to deport them, that would take them off the streets and avoid that. But you don't think that would equal out that way?
No, no, the federal agents are aware when an individual is gonna be released from jail or prison. They can wait for them. As they're being released and then, uh, do their job and arrest the individual, uh, for a violation of immigration law. It's that simple.
When we see all the videos, like some of the uh enforcement actions right here we're looking at that happened earlier this year, right after the first of the year when the these that we're seeing took place, uh, we're not seeing them now due to the injunction, but it's, it's this type of thing where they're just pulling people off of the street where within all this chaos of people running up with with cameras and whatnot. That they have to remember in their mind that simple rule?
They cannot detain individuals without a founded suspicion. So what I think folks are doing is videotaping that unlawful conduct by federal agents, and it amounts to, uh, plain and simple racial ethnic profiling, and that's un-American. Unconstitutional, and that's what the federal uh uh district court found in April of this year. They don't need to do that, they shouldn't do that, and it's being done for political reasons to advance the agenda of quote mass deportations. But that is un-American and -- unconstitutional.
Do you have another community meeting, uh, set up right now?
Uh, not at this point. Uh, we've done so many of them, um, when we originally started it, uh, with the, uh, Immigration Justice collaborative, we had, uh, just at one town hall meeting, 6000 people attended. And on a Zoom meeting, we had almost 10,000. But at the same time, federal agents should comply with the law. If they comply with the law, what happened that we saw in MacArthur Park should not have happened, uh, at all. It's just un-American, plain and simple.
HA Sala, local attorney and immigration specialist, thank you for coming in and sharing your time. I know you're a very busy man. We appreciate it.
Thank you.
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