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Home – Immigration Policy News – Havana Should Not Dictate American Immigration Enforcement

Havana Should Not Dictate American Immigration Enforcement

In 2008, Fort Myers police officer Andrew Widman was shot in the face and killed on a downtown street. He was a husband and father of three, and he never had the chance to draw his weapon.

The man who killed him, Abel Arango, was an armed robber already ordered removed from the country. Cuba refused to take him back, and so, under the rule this bill is written to fix, he was released into the community that later buried Widman. That release did not hinge on anything Arango did in custody. It hinged on a decision made in Havana.

This is not a unique event. Look to San Francisco in 2012, where Binh Thai Luc murdered five members of one family in their home. He too had been ordered removed. Vietnam refused to issue travel documents, the clock ran out, and he was released.

Two cities, two refusing regimes, the same outcome. When a foreign government will not accept its own national, current American law does the releasing on its behalf.

That is the loophole in one sentence, and several U.S. senators are working to close it. The people attacking this fix never state the nature of the loophole plainly. They prefer to shout about supposed indefinite detention and wave around Zadvydas v. Davis, the 2001 case they clearly have not read.

The court did not order anyone released after six months. It read a reasonableness limit into a statute that was silent on prolonged custody, in order to avoid a constitutional question, and set six months as presumptively reasonable. After that, an alien wins release only by showing no significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably........

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