Trump is using immigration law to 'criminalize political opposition': legal expert

President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown is about more than just immigrants, legal analyst Leah Litman told MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Friday evening — it's about laying the groundwork to create a police state that can be mobilized against Trump's political opponents.

This follows the incident in New Jersey in which ICE arrested the mayor of Newark during a protest of a private detention facility.

"We have seen immigration law — I mean, there's 100 lawsuits, right, against the federal, against the Trump administration, but we have seen immigration law and immigration enforcement as the kind of tip of the spear," said Hayes. "We first had a judge arrested in Wisconsin, a state judge frogmarched out. We're now seeing federal agents arresting a mayor. It does seem like the administration thinks this is the part of the law where they can push the constitutional envelope the furthest."

"Yes," agreed Litman. "So historically, immigration is an area where the political branches have had a lot of authority. And I think it's no accident that they are trying to use this area of law to basically criminalize political opposition here, arresting representatives, arresting judges. And in other context, basically arresting people for any unfavorable speech or bad thoughts they might have."

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"And we have on that Rümeysa Öztürk, who, of course, is the grad student from Tufts University, we'll have some news about that later," said Hayes. "She was released today after, again, a federal court said, whatever latitude you have, you don't have the latitude to do this. And kind of came in and said, this is this is no good. I imagine we're going to see an appeal at some sort of filing from the mayor here about whether they have even the legal authority. I don't even know under what legal authority who these agents are or under what authority they're arresting them."

"We don't know," said Litman. "They manage to discover new legal authorities all of the time. Secretary of State Marco Rubio found this old, ancient law that allowed him just to designate particular people as being adverse threats to the foreign policy of the United States, again, largely on the basis of op-eds and speech, is part of a really disturbing pattern where they basically think the First Amendment allows you to say Republican things and that it's illegal to discriminate against Republicans or to criticize them, and that seems to be their view of the First Amendment."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

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