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.”
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.
It’s incredibly frustrating how everyone thinks the government shoild just steal roll over people on these things. These things are done this way because sometimes the fine is wrong.
Everyone wants heavy immediate enforcement until they are the target and enforcement notice.
Our goal is compliance, not enforcement. The only people we throw the book at early are repeat offenders we’ve already suspended from pulling permits for repeat violations or anyone who tries to meet us with a lawyer.
We learned long ago that you can’t give a micrometer in this town to rich people who try to intimidate you with a lawyer. Other cities fold under that pressure, but with everyone in the city being in the top 0.1% there’s no way we can let lawyers intimidate us.
We go to court a few times a year, and our lawyers are way meaner than we are and haven’t lost a case since I’ve been with the city.