Court fight over DACA highlights legal rights of noncitizens
When Clete Samson was a government prosecutor at the Department of Homeland Security’s special immigration court, he says that respecting the constitutional rights of immigrants accused of breaking US laws was part of the job.
“It’s a myth that noncitizens don’t have constitutional rights because they are non citizens,” says Mr. Samson, who for eight years prosecuted cases for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “I hear it a lot now in all these immigration debates, that these individuals don’t even have due-process rights.”
A lot of his job entailed fending off constitutional habeas corpus challenges from immigrants detained by ICE, says Samson, who now runs a national immigration practice at Kutak
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