A federal judge in West Virginia has given the Trump administration an ultimatum: Stop illegally detaining immigrants or face contempt rulings and “monetary sanctions against responsible officials.”
“Today, the Government continues to wrongfully detain those petitioners without due process,” [Goodwin’s] opinion reads. “Even now the Government incredulously asserts that the federal district courts do not have jurisdiction, that petitioners cannot raise due process violations, and that the Government has authority to mandatorily and indefinitely detain noncitizens in the local jail. The Government is wrong. Judges in this district have said that over and over and over again. I have said it myself.”
So instead of something like proportional fines related to the value of the properties, you’ve fucked over the working class for violations that they didn’t commit, didn’t know about, and likely had no control over? Do you have any idea what an unexpected $500, $1000, or $1500 bill can do to a family that is struggling? Are these fines even legal? What types of violations by the rich are the working class being made to pay for? Do you also send warnings to the workers before taking their money, or do the owners get a warning and you just hope they tell everyone else? I find this little story completely abhorrent and I hope some of these workers sue your organization and get their money back.
The people we’re talking about have billions and we can only legally charge them a few thousand. We can’t cut off the money spigot, so we cut off the supply of workers willing to work for them.
And the workers that get fined are the ones still performing the work after we’ve issued a verbal and written stop-work order and cited the owners. And it’s not like we just put something in the mail - we discover the work by driving by, seeing the workers on site, and speaking with them directly and telling them to stop. Our code enforcement people don’t cite the individual workers until their third trip to the site in which they’re told to stop. Hell - if they stopped when we first asked we wouldn’t even know who to cite if we wanted.
Most of the time, they stop without being cited and work with us on permitting and remediation. We end up having to go after the contractors for violation of a SWO about 1% of the time (though we’ll also cite them for other things like wrenching through public utilities in the ROW more often). And in those cases it’s almost always the contractors who lie and either tell the owners a permit isn’t needed or that they already have one. The last time we did it they had actually printed out a forged permit placard.
And that 1% that repeatedly refuses to follow the rules gets to go to court and explain their side to the judge, where the reality is they’ll probably have the daily fine dismissed and only pay the initial $500 or whatever if they start to cooperate.