6 events in Passaic County with a date

You say you're American? Be ready to prove it

By: Anthony enriquez
Guest columnist
Your Turn

..... A family of U.S. citizens detained by ICE in Milwaukee for speaking Spanish.
..... American Indians of the Navajo nation in Arizona - US. citizens - detained in ICE interrogation rooms.
..... You say you're American? Be ready to prove it with your papers.
..... Earlier this month, [03/2025] the department of Homeland Security announced the forthcoming creation of a national registry of non-citizens, threatening fines, criminal charges and jail time for anyone who fails to comply. the roots of America's new national registration scheme lie in the World War II-era law originally enacted in 1940 as the Alien Registration Act. It crated an expansive federal policing bureaucracy to collect and warehouse personally identifiable information of more than 4.9 million people and was marshaled to imprison Japanese Americans in interment camps. In 1952, at the height of the anti-communist Red Scare, the law was amended to require carrying proof of a registration document at all times, at a time when Congress traded away Americans' civil liberties for short-term electoral victories in scaremongering campaigns.
..... But in the decades after, cooler heads prevailed. Americans came to recognize that a national registration scheme was inextricably tiled to racially discrimination polices, like Japanese internment, that are now condemned as gravely wrong in the court of history. Registration also came to be deeply politically unpopular due to massive financial costs required for maintenance, intrusions on privacy posed by the government's collection of personally identifiable data, and harassment by police who felt empowered to abuse the law to arbitrarily demand registraiton papers from law-abiding people. The law fell int disuse, a wartime relic of the pre-civil rights era, and the federal government abandon its enforcement almost entirely.

What happens if police do not belove you are a U.S. citizen?

..... Now the impending return of national registraiton threatens to bring those harms back with a vengeance. A January [2025] executive order requires law enforcement to prioritize prosecutions for failure to register and carry, giving police free rein to arrest suspected immigrants for failure to provide proof of registration.
..... If you're a U.S. citizen, you may be thinking" "What's the big deal? But there is no national database or universal identification document for U.S. citizens. So the real question is: what happens if the police don't believe you?
..... A decade ago, I found out the answer to that question as part of a team of litigators who sued the customs and Border Protection Buffalo Field Office after learning of a pattern of wrongful arrests of U.S. citizens and other for failure to carry registration. We uncovered public records the office was withholding that revealed a cash bonus program for officers.
..... Evidence indicated that bonuses were tied to the number of arrest they conducted. Officers were padding arrest by boarding domestic buses and trains to demand proof of compliance with the national registration scheme. Temporary visitors and U.S. citizens, both exempt form the scheme by law, were among the hundreds of people detained, cuffed or sent to jail.
..... President Donald Trump, an avowed fan of stop-and-Fisk policing, now aims to take those practices national. His executive order requires federal law enforcement to tart failure to register or to carry proof of registration as a civil and criminal enforcement priority, punishable anywhere form one to six months in federal prison.
..... If the only way to avoid arrest is to carry proof of citizenship at all times, then the so-called Alien Registration Act works like a citizen registration scheme, too. Opposition to such a scheme is one of the rare spots of agreement across the political spectrum. Second amendment enthusiasts fear setting precedent for the creation of a national gun registry. Libertarians decry intrusion on privacy and the right to be left alone. And civil rights advocates point to the historical tendency of registrations schemes to devolve in unwarranted police surveillance and racial profiling.
..... Whatever the motivation, it's time for Congress to repeal American;s newly resurrected national registration scheme. until it does, it's up to the private bar to safeguard the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable police searches and seizures by using officers and agencies that conduct illegal arrests. Because with Trump mandating daily immigration arrest quotes in the thousands, we've all got a target on our backs.

..... Anthony Enriquez is the vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, an advocacy organization based in New York

HOME