Attorney General Michael Mukasey left us, especially immigrants, a parting gift, so that they don’t start this new year and new presidential administration with any false ideas of where their place is: deported.

In a decision issued Wednesday, January 7, the Attorney General declared that henceforth, immigrants, asylum seekers, and all others in removal (deportation) proceedings do not have any right under statute or the Constitution to representation by a lawyer before they can be ordered deported. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and most federal courts have for decades operated under the premise that immigrants DO have such rights. The Attorney General has reversed many years of precedent and operation by simply declaring it so.

According to the Attorney General, because there is no legal or constitutional right to a lawyer, immigrants do not have the right to legal counsel and thus no right to complain or request a new hearing when their lawyer is incompetent or fraudulent. The Attorney General does attempt to ameliorate the harsh impact of his revolutionary action by allowing reopening of cases in certain highly extreme circumstances, but his declaration will wipe out the rights of all but a handful of people with one stroke of his pen.

That’s right immigrants. Don’t assume you have any rights in the united States, including one of the most basic, due process, and if you did have legal counsel who made a mistake or didn’t do their job. Too bad. You actually didn’t even need counsel because removal proceedings are not criminal affairs but rather civil matters.

Aliens in removal proceedings have no right to counsel, including Government-appointed counsel, under the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution because the Sixth Amendment applies only to criminal proceedings and removal proceedings are civil in nature.

So, if deportation proceedings are civil in nature then that would mean that undocumented immigrants are not criminals — violators of a criminal law — but only in violation of a civil offense. A much less scary perception.

Hopefully the Obama administration will reverse this order as soon as possble, pero in the meantime, the Feds can’t have it both ways. They can’t criminalize immigrants on the one hand and then say that actions to remove immigrants aren’t criminal matters.

Via / Latina Lista, AILF