So what’s the latest news from Incarceration Nation? Well, as the ACLU tells us, there are a million stories in Incarceration Nation and some of them really suck.

Ms. L. had fled with her child from their home in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Ms. L. left in fear for her life. Now, the pair was finally in the United States, seeking asylum in a country where they thought they would be safe. Approximately four days later, Ms. L.’s young daughter was taken from her without any explanation or justification. When the officers separated them, Ms. L. could hear her daughter in the next room screaming that she did not want to be taken away from her mother. No one explained why her daughter was being taken away, where she was being taken, or when she would see her child again. More than 3 1/2 months later, Ms. L. remains at a detention center in the San Diego area, while her daughter is detained in Chicago, halfway across the country, without her mother or anyone else she knows.

Because Ms. L. passed the initial asylum screening, which established that she had a “credible fear” of returning to the Congo, she and her child are eligible for release. But, even if there were some legitimate reason that the two couldn’t be released, Ms. L. and her daughter could be reunited in a family detention center. Instead, in flagrant disregard of the Constitution and common sense, the government has separated a young child from her mother.

At the moment, the DRC, which is not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo, is undergoing what the United Nations calls an “extraordinary humanitarian disaster.” From Reuters:

Clashes between militias representing the Luba, a Bantu ethnic group, and Twa pygmies, have already been going on for more than four years, driven by inequalities between Bantu villagers and the Twa, a hunting and gathering people historically excluded from access to land and basic services…UNHCR partner agencies had documented about 800 “protection incidents” including killings, abductions and rape, in the first two weeks of February. But much of the violence was going on in areas that were impossible for aid workers to reach. The “lion’s share” of abuses concerned extortion and illegal taxation, mostly carried out by Congolese armed forces at road blocks. The conflict is part of a worsening humanitarian crisis in Congo. Militia violence has risen since President Joseph Kabila’s refused to step down when his constitutional mandate expired in 2016. Congo’s military has largely stamped out an insurrection that displaced 1.5 million people in central Congo in 2016-17 but militias are increasingly active along the eastern borders with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

It sounds like the unfortunate Ms. L and her daughter had good reason to come here—the same good reason that millions of people previously had to immigrate to this country, which is to say political violence of one kind or another.

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What they didn’t count on, it appears, is that this is a crueler place than it once was. And that cruelty was given something of a boost on Tuesday by the United States Supreme Court. In the case of Jennings v. Rodriguez, the Court reversed a decision from the Ninth Circuit that required periodic bond hearings for immigrants in detention.

The 5-3 decision sending the case back to the Ninth Circuit and written by Justice Samuel Alito essentially says that people so detained can be held in custody indefinitely without even a head-fake toward due process. For these people, no matter how they came into this country, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments do not exist. (Rodriguez, who was brought here as an infant, has been a legal resident of the United States since 1987.) From NPR:

It's a profound loss for those immigrants appealing what are sometimes indefinite detentions by the government. Many are held for long periods of time — on average, 13 months — after being picked up for things as minor as joyriding. Some are held even longer…But the court wrote in its 5-3 opinion Tuesday, "Immigration officials are authorized to detain certain aliens in the course of immigration proceedings while they determine whether those aliens may be lawfully present in the country."

Not that it likely would have mattered, but this was another case in which Justice Elena Kagan recused herself because of her earlier work as President Obama’s solicitor general.

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Nevertheless, Justice Stephen Breyer took the extraordinary step of reading his thwacking dissent from the bench. Breyer’s opinion framed the case as an affront to an America that once was. An excerpt from the dissent:

We cannot here engage in this legal fiction. No one can claim, nor since the time of slavery has anyone to my knowledge successfully claimed, that persons held within the United States are totally without constitutional protection. Whatever the fiction, would the Constitution leave the Government free to starve, beat, or lash those held within our boundaries? If not, then, whatever the fiction, how can the Constitution authorize the Government to imprison arbitrarily those who, whatever we might pretend, are in reality right here in the United States? The answer is that the Constitution does not authorize arbitrary detention. And the reason that is so is simple: Freedom from arbitrary detention is as ancient and important a right as any found within the Constitution’s boundaries.

The bail questions before us are technical but at heart they are simple. We need only recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, in particular its insistence that all men and women have “certain unalienable Rights,” and that among them is the right to “Liberty.” We need merely remember that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause protects each person’s liberty from arbitrary deprivation. And we need just keep in mind the fact that, since Blackstone’s time and long before, liberty has included the right of a confined person to seek release on bail. It is neither technical nor unusually difficult to read the words of these statutes as consistent with this basic right. I would find it far more difficult, indeed, I would find it alarming, to believe that Congress wrote these statutory words in order to put thousands of individuals at risk of lengthy confinement all within the United States but all without hope of bail.

That’s what used to be. Cruelty is the fashion now, and it has been for quite some time.

Since 2001, we have become a country that tortures people, that searches without warrants, and that holds people without trial and without bail. We have become a country that elects an unqualified know-nothing to represent the new country we have created, to exemplify a very ordinary nation with extraordinary fears.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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