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.”
You can only issue arrest warrants for criminal contempt, meaning Trump can just issue a pardon. Civil contempt isn’t subject to the pardon power.
And the people to issue the contempt judgements against aren’t Trump and team. They need to issue them to the foot soldiers. It sounds weak, but it’s effective.
I work in in the development department of a very small municipality that’s an enclave for the mega-rich. Literally 100% of households are at least multi-millionaires. The average new house being built is about 8 million dollars. That means that when we Rey tonfine homeowners for illegal shit, it means nothing because they can just write a check if they don’t want to comply.
So we’ve recently changed tactics on code enforcement. We start by telling them to stop and issuing a citation to the owners, but when they don’t we fine the individual workers on site and if things aren’tcleaned up we start to cite them each $500/day until they start to comply. It didn’t take long until the rich assholes couldn’t find workers willing to do their bidding.
hilarious that they pay the fine to get the thing but won’t pay someone else’s smaller fine to get the thing out of sheer moneybrain
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.
You can tell the trully advanced countries from the backwards ones by them having fines which are proportional to income/wealth rather than fixed.
The only ones I know which are the former are in Scandinavia.
The UK theoretically also has that for Court fines (it’s in the conviction guidance, which means it’s optional), but in practice not really.
You think a municipality can issue proportional fines just because it wants to? They don’t write the laws.
This happens all the time even on the federal level. My company just ate a several thousand $ fine because we were working on a site where the plumbers didn’t mark an open pit while plumbing a mop sink. We were the HVAC contractors working on the roof. We were not even working in the same area and had no way of knowing what the plumbers were doing. OSHA didn’t care. Every company who was working the job got hit with a fine for continuing work on an unsafe site. It’s complete bullshit but, at the same time, everyone onsite is going to think twice about ever working with those plumbers again. So even though it’s complete and utter shit, it is probably the most effective tool at their disposal with current laws.