by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

This week Indianapolis got its turn.

ICE agents took three men out of a beauty salon in Lawrence. Two restaurants in Columbus closed early after a video went around Facebook. Families in Seymour started a GoFundMe. By Thursday night there were people standing outside a Hampton Inn on West 73rd Street yelling at a hotel, because that’s where they believed the agents were sleeping.

So let me say this plainly, so nobody has to guess where I am.

If you are in this country illegally and you have hurt somebody — a conviction for rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, dealing, molesting a child — I will help carry your bags to the plane. That is not a close question. But if all somebody did was come across the border, that’s the equivalent of a misdemeanor, and we don’t run task forces for misdemeanors.

I’m not being cute. That’s the statute.

If you came in legally on a visa and stayed past the expiration, you haven’t committed a crime at all. Unlawful presence is a civil violation, which is why immigration court isn’t criminal court, why there’s no right to appointed counsel, and why the government doesn’t have to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt.

And if you walked across between ports of entry, 8 U.S.C. § 1325 caps a first offense at six months. Under the federal grading statute, six months or less is a Class B misdemeanor. Indiana’s Class B misdemeanor tops out at 180 days. Same drawer as a lot of things that get you a fine and a court date. The felony is § 1326 — coming back after you’ve already been removed.

Congress could have made walking across the border a felony. It didn’t. It made it a six-month misdemeanor and left overstays out of the criminal code entirely. That is Congress telling you how serious it thought this was.

So think about what we’re actually proposing when we say a person should be removed for nothing but the entry itself. We are saying a Class B misdemeanor earns you permanent exile. We don’t do that to anybody else in this state, for anything.

Get picked up for public intoxication downtown — Class B misdemeanor, same tier — and nobody suggests you be put out of Indiana and barred from setting foot in it for the next decade. Catch a disorderly conduct for running your mouth at a bar, also Class B, and you don’t lose custody of your kids over it. Hit somebody’s car in a parking lot and drive off, which is a Class B misdemeanor under our leaving-the-scene statute, and the worst thing that happens is a fine, some points, and a very bad phone call with your insurance agent.

Illegal entry gets you removal, a bar on lawful return that runs ten years under INA § 212(a)(9)(A), and, if you’ve got a citizen kid, a choice about whether that child leaves the only country he’s ever lived in or grows up without you. All for conduct Congress priced at six months.

So when someone tells you “they broke the law,” they’re right. They’re just declining to say which one.

Now the numbers. As of July 11, TRAC counted 65,765 people in ICE detention, and 70.6 percent of them — 46,436 human beings — had no criminal conviction at all. Many of those who did had traffic offenses. Syracuse’s Austin Kocher, working from ICE’s own internal data, found the agency arrested roughly 49,138 people in July and more than half had no criminal history whatsoever. When Sen. Durbin’s office asked about Chicago’s Operation Midway Blitz, ICE conceded that about 81 percent of those arrests had no convictions.

Asked what was happening in Indiana this week, DHS said its agents enforce the nation’s immigration laws in all 50 states, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Then it sent reporters five names — people it said were convicted of kidnapping, identity theft, rape, child neglect and aggravated assault.

Fine. Those five should go. But five names is not an accounting of a statewide sweep. It’s a press release. If Indiana’s ratio is better than the national ratio, show us the ratio. Congressman André Carson has now formally asked DHS for exactly that — how many, where, whether targeted or picked up incidentally, and under what authority. It’s a fair question, and the fact that it had to be asked in a letter is itself the story.

Indiana didn’t get dragged onto this train. We bought a ticket. Governor Braun — and I like the man — signed the executive order in January of last year, and the state followed with 287(g) agreements covering State Police, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Correction and the National Guard, plus up to 1,000 beds at Miami Correctional and Camp Atterbury on standby. That was a choice. Choices come with a bill.

Here’s the part that ought to bother conservatives more than it apparently does. Detention is expensive government. Masked agents in unmarked cars, city and county officials who say nobody told them anything, a taqueria closing at four in the afternoon because of a cell phone video — that isn’t order. Order is when people know what the rules are and who’s enforcing them. What we have instead is a federal agency with a headcount target, enormous discretion, and no apparent obligation to explain itself. That’s the thing conservatives spent forty years warning the rest of us about.

The fix isn’t open borders and it isn’t abolishing anybody. It’s the same triage every prosecutor in this state runs before nine in the morning. Convictions for violence first. Pending violent charges next. Then everything else, in the order that actually protects somebody. Rank by threat, not by tonnage. If the mission is public safety, the arrest sheet ought to look like public safety.

I have seen this play before. The government “starts” with the worst of the worst, and ends up with everybody else.

Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He was born in this country, which makes him a citizen. He has a passport. He also carries the passport card, because it fits in a wallet and the occasion may arise.