"We'll Take Away Their Liberty for Your Security"

The last time the Feds planned to round up large numbers of law-abiding people for nebulous security reasons was in 1987. Functionaries in the INS, following the orders of the Reagan Administation, wrote a 40 page memo outlining how to arrest and detain several thousand people.

The 40-page memo described a government contingency plan for rounding up thousands of legal alien residents of eight specified nationalities: Libya, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Morocco. Emergency legal measures would be deployed—rescinding the right to bond, claiming the privilege of confidential evidence, excluding the public from deportation hearings, among others. In its final pages, buried in a glaze of bureaucratese, the memo struck its darkest note: A procedure to detain and intern thousands of aliens while they awaited what would presumably become a mass deportation.

A 100 acre concentration camp was to be carved out of the backwoods of Louisiana to hold people who were (a) in the country legally, and (b) had not done anything wrong, other than to be from a certain set of countries.

The plan was to revoke people's visas, declare them to be illegally in the country, lie to the immigration judges about having "classified evidence" and deport them all en masse.

If you've followed some of the terrorist cases over the last 15 or so yours, you may have noted repeated attempts by the Feds to say "we've got evidence, but we can't show you". There's nothing new, is there?

Time and time again, government, both large and small, has viewed the Constitution as an inconvenient piece of paper. It takes the scrutiny of the press, lawyers and public attention to force them to to honor it.