United Liberty

I, for one, welcome the ballsy-ness of our new ICE overlords:

The ACLU of Tennessee filed a lawsuit this week in federal court on behalf of fifteen residents of an apartment complex in Nashville, TN who say they were targets of an unlawful immigration raid. The defendants allege that ICE agents and Metro Nashville police officers forced their way into their homes without warrants. When residents asked the officers to show a warrant, one agent reportedly said, “We don’t need a warrant, we’re ICE.” Then, gesturing to his genitals, the officer reportedly said “the warrant is coming out of my balls.”

I’m sure he meant it was going to be generated in his balls and then be distributed via his deployment tube; if it actually was coming out of his balls, he should get them checked. I don’t think they’re supposed to have holes in them. I mean, they’re not Wiffle balls, are they?

Snark aside, this is yet another dangerous abuse of government power. It is nothing new, and that’s the part I find most shocking. In the most powerful country on Earth*, one that has in the past championed civil liberties the most, where we have a Constitutional amendment protecting privacy in one’s home and prohibiting officials from invading said privacy, we have “law” enforcement going around completely disrespecting said law in order to pursue, at best, questionable policy outcomes set in place by politicians with, at best, questionable comprehension of the situation and the consequences. And we’re not outraged by this? What a docile population we’ve become.

The concept of rule of law—and it’s opposing concept, the rule by law—was best explained to me by Tom Palmer, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, while I was an intern at Cato. Rule of law is having a legal framework that everyone operates under; rule by law is where law is merely a tool used by those in power to oppress those who aren’t. (Basically, it’s the academic way of saying “I AM THE LAW!”) Here is a video of a speech he gave back in 2009 that touches on those topics and explains them far better than I ever could.

So while the ICE officer is getting himself checked out, maybe he can also check out the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment. I’m sure it would be worth his time.

(h/t @normative)

*Arguably.