Epstein Files Distraction & ICE Racial Profiling

for the limited purpose of obtaining an indictment. Now, there are certain ccumstances where prosecutors will use a grand jury as more of an investigative tool, and in that instance you might have more witness testimony in front of a grand jury. But for the most part, when you're the prosecutor, the last thing you want to do is put a key witness in front of the grand jury, because that testimony would then have to be turned over to the defense council at some point.

a witness says during the course of an interview. But when a prosecutor presents is or her case to the grand jury, if they put an FBI agent on the stand, that testimony will be very focused and will be very summary, in the sense that all the prosecutor is looking for is enough evidence to show a grand jury that there's probable cause that the crime has been committed, and that

there's enough evidence to move forward with the charges. So the reality is, as a prosecutor, you want to present as little information as you need in front of the grand jury in order to obtain that indictment.

of that information. In fact, when you represent a witness who goes to testify before the grand jury, as the lawyer, even you are not permitted to go inside the grand jury only the witnesses, and you can debrief your client after they come out, because the witnesses themselves can talk about what their testimony was, but nobody else can talk about what goes on in the grand jury, not any of the grand jurors and not any of the federal prosecutors.

And there's good reason for that. The grand jury is an investigative tool. Information is presented to a grand jury that may not ever result in an indictment. Charges may never be brought. And the concept behind Rule six e is that all of those proceedings are secret unless and

until an indictment is returned by that grand jury. And it's done in order to preserve the privacy of victims and even the privacy of individuals who prosecutors may suspect have committed a crime, but ultimately if they're never charged. The idea that would be unfair to release damaging information about an individual who then never gets their day in court if they're never charged with a crime.

interests in the Jeffrey Epstein case. It's going to be interesting to see how the judge handles that request because there are many cases that are very high profile of which there is long standing and legitimate public interests, and typically a judge will.

is released, it would have to be heavily redacted. And by that I mean that the names of victims and perhaps even the names of some individuals would be blacked out and not released to the public. So the reality is that this motion may take some time for the judge to decide, and then even if the judge decides to release that information, there may be parts of it that are blacked out and never released to the public.

So we really don't know how critical this information ultimately will be even if the judge decides to grant the government's motion.

prejudicial to her. So there's an awful lot for the court to weigh in the balancing act of trying to figure out what, if any, information should be released. And then I think the real interesting question is, even if the judge does grant this motion and release some of this grand jury information, just how critical will it be in terms of answering the questions that seem to be motivating the Department of Justice to file this motion for the release of grand jury testimony.

None of that information will be released based upon the government's motion. So there's lots of information that's still going to be out there, and I think the pressure is going to continue to mount to release more information. It is, I should say, a highly unusual circumstance here. It's highly unusual for the Attorney General of the United States to be asking a court to unseal grand jury testimony. That's even more unusual for the President of the United States

to be weighing in on that question. So we're in a circumstance here where there is not a lot of precedence to see how the courts may look at this information. Generally, the worts are reluctant to release this type of information given the privacy concerns that are at stake here, and the concept that is simply unfair to release the names of individuals who may have been caught up an investigation but who are never ultimately charged with a crime.

you with this investigation. The decision by the Department of Justice to seek the unsealing of the grand jury testimony is somewhat unusual because that testimony is going to be focused on building the case against Jeffrey Epstein, on the case against Glaine Maxwell, and specifically on the conduct that form the basis of the criminal charges against them, which means it's a narrowly foot focused investigation, and the grand jury testimony is likewise going to be narrowly focused on

the evidence that they had to present to the grand jury in order to obtain those criminal charges. The remainder of the files are going to be much more far reaching. They're likely to involve other individuals and perhaps other activity that never made its way into either of those indictments.

But then you raise the question of bringing in the names of victims and other individuals who were never charged with a crime, and balancing that against the groundswell of public interest to release this information.

grand jury. It remains in the investigatory files of the DODA, and the real question is will that information ever be released?

country illegally. That means they could be in detention for months or even years as they fight their deportations, and a federal judge says ICE can't use racial profiling in carrying out arrests. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg. The City of laws Autels has been a focus of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, with complaints that ICE is roaming around car washes, home depots, and libraries and targeting

Spanish speaking day laborers for arrest. Here's La Mayor Karen Bass And when.

day labors and others to arrest on immigration charges. Is this the way ICE has normally operated or is this something new.

this way. ICE has tried to go after people with final orders of removal, or people with criminal convictions, or people in targeted operations where there's something known about the operations, such as that it's a business that exploits their workers

or is involved in some sort of trafficking, et cetera. Now, there have been times, most notably in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, in the last part of the Bush administration, and then beginning points in the Trump administration of the first term, where ICE had started to act in this manner, going around essentially trying to find people it can actually apprehend and place into removal proceedings. And

this is the new norm. I would say, It's not something that is very common over the last twenty five years, but it is something that is within their mandate. They're permitted to go and try to find people who are not here with status and place them under arrest and place them into deportation proceedings and then actually deport them. Now, the problem is going to be the methods of how

ICE operates. And this litigation is very fascinating in that this has been a debate between the pro immigration enforcement people and the pro what I would call, you know, relaxation on immigration enforcement people, where they've had this debate about what is it permissible for ICE to do in these operations? Are their limits to what it can do? And that's what was being debated in this case. And I think it's ultimately going to have to take the Supreme Court to adjudicate these issues.

that ICE agents can't rely on those factors. Who do you think is right here?

It's not necessary. You can go after whatever the actual violation of the law is. So did you file your taxes? Did you steal from the store, whatever it may be, So you don't have to do this profiling. And so it's easy to say, if you're profiling, it's illegal, and that's the end of it, because the profiling has nothing to do with the underlying offense. Is the car stole and did somebody steal, did somebody not file some document, whatever it may be. The problem in immigration is this

is a status offense. You're either here legally or you're not here legally. So what are the ndisha of a person who's not here legally? It is some of these things. You know, are you speaking in certain languages versus other languages. Are you engaging in behavior that looks like you're smuggling

someone at that moment, that kind of thing. Now, obviously these things can be taken too far, and for sure that's the problem is if you're engaging in this profiling in a way where it's aggressive and it's all over the community, and it's everywhere, and anybody who speaks a non English language to their grandmother who happens to be here legally, but she never learned English for whatever reason, but she's here legally, And now everybody's being arrested because

the ICE agent hears somebody speaking to their grandmother in a different language or something, or ICE arrest a bunch of tourists here to see some soccer game or something because they don't speak the language. Just like if I travel to Europe, I don't speak whatever language I'm in in my European country. If I'm suddenly being confronted by an immigration officer, you know, those are all tough issues. And so the question starts to become how that enforcement

comes into play. What are the constraints, what are not the constraints and so I think what the group who is suing would say is ICE, you have to be operating from a list of people you're looking for and go look for them, and then that's how you can enforce immigration law in America. That's basically what the group who is suing is saying. And what ICE is saying is that constrains us way too much because that takes time. And in addition, every time we try to make lists

like this, we're being thwarted in various different ways. You know, whether we try to make a list of criminals, the counties and the cities and the states who are quote unquote sanctuary jurisdiction don't allow us to make a list of criminals. They don't give us the names of people, so they make it harder for us to find those people. So we can't make a list of criminals in these places. If we try to get a list of people who are not using public benefits appropriately, we get thwarted by

lawsuits that say you can't do that either. And so this is the problem. Is ISA is saying, we need to be able to arrest somebody, and if people are making our lives difficult in terms of the effort and the resources and the constraints to make these lists to go find people. Then what we'd like to do is to be able to question people essentially when we have a reasonable suspicion that they're not here legally, and ask

them to produce identification that says they're here legally. This becomes super complicated, especially sometimes if you're just a US citizen, let's say, going for a jog. You don't have any legal duty when you're a US citizen going for a job to have any identification on you. But what if that means that you get arrested and you're put in detention for days or weeks until somebody figures out that you're in detention and can find the right document for you.

So all of that becomes very complicated and messy, and the courts, I do not envy what they're gonna have to try to do to ultimately come to a solution that's reasonable. I don't think the kind of injunction that was issued here will be allowed to ultimately remain in its full form, which is essentially that I mean, it doesn't exactly say this, but what it is essentially saying is I has to know who they're going after before they go after that, meaning they have to say, here's

a piece of paper called John Smith. I'm looking for John Smith. I'm going to apprehend John Smith, and I'm going to bring John Smith into detention. I don't think the ICE is going to be limited to just that, But the question is what is ICE going to be limited to, if anything, and if it's not limited to anything,

that will also create its own set of complexities. But I will say this, just if anybody's been paying attention to the Supreme Court over the last ten or twenty years, they don't like cases where they sort of have to guess something up front and issue an injunction. They like what's called the as applied challenges, where you can actually go to them and say a certain behavior and then say is this behavior unconstitutional or not.

which is that immigration detention is not criminal detention. And that matters because the courts have held that in immigration, the people going through this system have far fewer rights than people going through the criminal courts because it's not a criminal issue. So you don't have a right to a jury trial, don't have a right to counsel, or

any of these things. But why does that matter. That matters because since immigration is in the civil context and not in the criminal context, the government's ability to constitutionally detain someone, meaning you know, keep them locked up their

freedom is gone, is much more limited. And the courts have recognized this that in the civil context, there's very few reasons to have people in civil detention, and so what the courts have held is that if there's a statute that Congress has said makes the detention mandatory, which is what happens in cases where people have criminal convictions, the only reason that's currently constitutional is if the detention is brief and targeted enough to get you through the

proceeding quickly enough. And they have said, come to us with as applied challenges if the detention is too lengthy in this situation, you know, if you're taking it in a context where it's not a mandatory, statutory thing, and we know it's not because for decades administrations have said this is not mandatory. This is just now something that the administration is deciding to do. They're saying, we're not going to have bond hearings anymore. We're just going to

put people in detention. We are taking an optional policy and making it mandatory that people have to be in detention while they're in removal proceedings, at least in the initial hearings. I think courts are going to say that that's illegal, and you have to give people a chance to have bond. Just like if you're going through the

criminal process, you can have a bond hearing. So you know, there's plenty of people in criminal proceeding for murder who are out on bond while the murder proceeding is happening. Because what you're looking for is is the person likely to commit another crime? Are they likely to abscond, etc. Is the bond amount sufficient to make sure they'll come?

All of those indisha are required also in the immigration context, and even more because it's a civil detention, which really is not something that the law is very fond of as opposed to a criminal detention, and so at least in the lower courts, I think this is going to be very tough for the administration to put this policy

in place once the lawsuits get filed and rolling. But then again it's going to go up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court is going to have to decide does the administration have the ability to just change from the Again, the previous twenty five years, the norm was people who didn't commit crimes could get bond hearings where a judge would decide, hey, can you be constrained by a high bond and other things such that you're not dangerous, you're not a risk of absconding or do you have

to be placed in detention as opposed to just taking away this ability to who give people bond hearings whatsoever, which is what this policy does. We will see what the Supreme Court does. But in this context, the Supreme Court has only allowed it because it was congressionally mandated, it involved criminals, and it was for a short period

of time. If this is going to be many, many more people and non criminals, and it will be much lengthier because you're putting more and more people into a system that still, at the least at the moment, has the same amount of immigration judges, which means that that just makes every case longer because you have more people

going to the same number of immigration judges. I don't know if the Supreme Court is going to allow it, but again we'll have to see if they put any constraints on it in advance or do they make it again and as applied challenge where people have to come in let's say after six months or after a year, or after eighteen months and say, hey, I've been detained too long when my removal proceedings are pending, let me out. That's why we're gonna have to wait and see coming.

immigration law from the nineteen nineties. So they're saying that under section two thirty five, which says shall be detained, they're saying that the interpretation before was inaccurate and it means must be detained right.

you've detained them and placed them in removal forceeedings. Can they get out on bond or can they not get out on bond, and for the last twenty five years, that answer has been they can get out on bond. And the reason it has been that they can get out on bond is for the reasons I'm saying, which is that because the Congress didn't specifically say, like it did in the criminal context, you can't release them. So here there is no such statute that says you can't

release them. So you have to say that if Congress has a statute in one context that says you can't release them, that means that in this other context you probably can release them. This is going to be the question for the court is can the government constitutionally, in the civil context decide to not let people have the right to a bond hearing while their immigration proceedings are pending. And that's why the policy has been what it's been

the last twenty five years. Is nobody thought that the government could get away with this. But we're going to see.

We're going to see what the courts say. I don't think the lower courts will be friendly towards this position, especially in the jurisdictions where it's likely to be challenged, but it's possible the Supreme Court will say as they've been giving difference in some context to the Trump administration and immigration recently, that they are permitted to hold everybody in detention that's in the removal process, and then it will just be up to the constraints and the number

of facilities that the Trump administration has. So that's what we're going to have to wait and see. But whether this detention is constitutional or not will depend on a number of factors, which also include how lengthy is the detention going to be, and are these people really demonstrated to be flight risks, et cetera. And all of this is going to be litigated in the court.

action lawsuit last week to stop this. What do you think about their chances they're saying they're stripping them of rights afforded to them under immigration law and the Fifth Amendment.

even want us to do this. That's what they would say. From their perspective. The people representing the foreign nationals would say, wait a second. These are the people who are following everything correctly. They're actually showing up to their court hearing. They're not absconding. They have a process. You just don't like how long the process is going to take with these individuals, so you want to place them into an

expedited process. And by the way, the end result of placing them in this expedited process is that maybe seventy or eighty percent of them, after three or four weeks of detention, will go right back to the exact scenario they were in previously, and only maybe a fifth or a quarter of them will be able to be detained and deported on an expedited basis because they won't be able to meet the initial threshold of even having a

credible asylum claims. But yeah, some number will. And then the question is is the juice worth the squeeze there, And that just will depend on where you're looking at it from. From the perspective of Ice, if that's an extra fifty thousand people they can deport in a year, they might say, that's very worth it to us, especially since we didn't have to go into the community and have guns blazing and have armor and all of this.

But from the perspective of the immigrant Trice community, they would say, yeah, But now no one is showing up the court. And the whole point is you wanted people to show up that the court. They had a case, they were making their case. Now they have to make a different case. You're violating their due process because you're making them change the case that they had for no good reason. This is I think another case where I think there's likely to be success in the lower court.

But I think the Supreme Court likely at the end of this probably stays any injunction, and behind the scenes, what I think they would be debating and contemplating would be some sort of context where they say ICE has to be able to arrest somebody for something, and for us, this is better than the whole depot scenario. And so this is where I think these practical realities start colliding

with the laws. And certainly you wouldn't want to design a framework where people were terrified to go to immigration court because something bad was going to happen to them,

even mid process. So the point is, yes, they may know that at the final hearing they will either win or be deported, fine, so that there's always that, But mid process, when you don't even think you have any fear of being deported, the fact that you would go to court for a check in hearing and be placed in detention that same day, I think that's alarming to people.

And if the result is that people stop going to court because of that, then there can be perhaps a claim made that says encouraging people to basically end up having in absentia removal orders, because that's what happens when you don't go to court is you automatically forfeit your case and you can be removed because you were in absentia, you didn't show off the court, and so that's gonna has to be the argument that's made, and we'll have to see where the court come out on this.

that takes time and effort and energy to do. And when they have one of these huge operations that they publicize, it maybe captures two hundred and fifty people, and it took many, many agents over many many days, and so it doesn't yield the kind of numbers they're looking for. They're looking to try to arrest thirty five hundred people

a day. And if you are trying to arrest thirty five hundred people a day and get, you know, into a scenario where you're over a million people you're deporting in a year, then the only way to accomplish that is to try to arrest people without criminal convictions that you can find in other locations such as ice check in court, or people who you know were here legally but their status expired because they came in under one of the statuses that the Biden administration created, which were

again you know, these are debates about whether those statuses were proper to create or not. But the point is these people are well known, they're out in the open, they were here legally, they're the easiest to apprehend. And so you do have some segment of the restrictionists individuals who say that's the people you should be going after.

You need to get deported. Every single person who came in under the Biden administration, whether they came in illegally through the border or through one of these programs, and I think ICE has taken that rhetoric seriously, and that appears to be the large segment of who they're looking for are the people who enter, be it illegally or legally during the Biden administration, in addition to criminals, but again, as you pointed out, not the majority of criminals because

of how resource intensive that process is.

convictions and weren't otherwise employed in the marketplace. It's not this is not the easiest job to recruit people for it. Because people understand what they sign up to become ICE agents. It has a certain wear and tear to it. So it's not really the easiest job that the recruit for. And so from that standpoint, all of this is going to have to be brought up. But as these agents and resources start getting brought up, you will see the

numbers get higher. But then the question is going to be fine, as the numbers get higher, now what And that's where the society starts pushing back. And you're starting to see this on that front too. So there's the resource constraints on why the numbers are low. Those are going to be taken away soon and the resources will

permit higher numbers of removals. And then the question is when that's actually being implemented, what's that going to look like and feel like in your average big city And is there going to be the level of pushback where the president himself is getting contacted by numbers of people saying, hey, I know you're deporting XYZ, but don't support my person and he keeps hearing that over and over again, and everybody has a person that they care about, and now

suddenly you know, it becomes a process where the exception swallow up the rule, and that's where we're going to have to wait and see what happens there.