Technically incorrect, Supreme Court precedent has held that aliens are entitled to lesser First Amendment protections while seeking to enter the United States. You could be on US Soil (i.e. entering customs at an airport) and those protections don't apply.
The person in question said he was in Geneva when he received the email from Google. Therefore is a non-US citizen residing outside the country entitled to 1A protections for something they said or did while in the US? I'm not expressing an opinion but I wouldn't take that statement as legal advice.
To condone what happens to him, you must first condone that your government lists and identifies people attending opponent meetings.
Whether the government waits for him to leave the country to violate his rights feels like a small detail in this issue.
Also, if you intend to claim that us foreigners are free targets for any abhorent behaviour of your government, maybe you should rename your bill of rights a bill of privileges.
It has nothing to do with condoning. It has everything to do with stating what the law is And what is or is what is not required to comply. And what is and what is not permitted under the Constitution. Whether you like it or not has nothing to do with anything.
Whoa! I’d slow down with the hypotheses, considering we have one side of the story.
What we do know is that the US, like all other countries, has wide legal latitude on not allowing foreigners into the country. You can be denied entry for no more than a Facebook like of the wrong post.
The policy of applying US immigration enforcement actions against legal visa holders who have attended specific legal (US based) protests has been publicly reported and confirmed by many government officials and is unrelated to anyone trying to enter the country.
Senior ICE officials have testified under oath in federal court that analysts were moved from counterterrorism, global trade, and cybercrime work to this group focused specifically on writing reports about people involved in student protests.
Yes? Why would a government allow people who aren't citizens to come in and protest on its soil about its actions? I think that's the definition of forgein interference.
The United States has no motive in the constitution or otherwise to let anyone in who behaves in a hostile manner to the country, it's people, or its government.
It's basic rationality. To argue otherwise is to argue that the US has no right to defend itself against external hostile attackers. Utter absurdity. What's the point of a country if it must allow anyone and everyone to enter?
Criticizing the government is not hostility. Its wanting to move towards a better country. This is EXACTLY what the 1st amendment is intended to protect. Whether the legal system decides it applies here is one question, but there are heaps of documents and communications between founding fathers and other figures making this clear. Many of those folks were immigrants themselves. So the idea that it wouldn't apply to legal immigrants is wildly out of line with the founding ethos of the country.
I think on average, outside perspectives are less well-informed than inside ones. It's a decent first-pass filter for quality, despite its inaccuracy.
I see this frequently as an engineer: my pet peeve is the "can't we just..." from someone who has no idea how the system works. Occasionally they're correct that we could make a trivial change to make something work... But most times, that "just" is hand-waving away days/weeks of effort. On the other hand, when "can't we just ..." is uttered by someone else on the same team, they're usually correct that the change is indeed trivial.
In this case, "outside" vs "inside" is actually a good proxy for how informed or accurate the opinion actually is.
Another good example is the stereotypical "expert in a field who thinks their expertise trivially transfers to unrelated fields".
To put it more simply: the distinction exists because outsiders are very frequently blind to the internal complexity of something (a system, an idea, etc), but are still willing to confidently assert their ideas anyway, leading to a frequent association of "outsider" with "poorly-formed opinions".
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The United States has no motive in the constitution or otherwise to let anyone in who behaves in a hostile manner to the country, it's people, or its government.
Here we are back at the same argument that I just brought:
The definition of what "hostile" is is very arbitrary and can be defined to suit your political agenda.
In the US, the bill of rights and specifically the first amendment unambiguously applies to anyone who is lawfully present in the country, citizen or not.
Yes, and this person had left the US, needed permission to reenter, and thus the Secretary of State had the power to deny entry because it "wasn't in the interest of the country".
> The policy of applying US immigration enforcement actions against legal visa holders who have attended specific legal (US based) protests has been publicly reported and confirmed by many government officials and is unrelated to anyone trying to enter the country.
So in this context, the GP asked “Why would a government allow people who aren't citizens to come in and protest on its soil about its actions?” and that was the question I’m answering. The answer is: because preventing someone who is already in the country lawfully from protesting violates the constitution.
The EFF letter tends to line up with this guy’s story, though.
Also, since google complied without giving him the ability to challenge the request, we will never have another version. In that context, it feels fair to accept the only version we have.
The events he was likely targeted for happened on a campus in the US.
Yes, someone in customs at an airport can be treated as functionally “at the border” with reduced protections.
But you are conflating seeking entry with being present inside the country. That’s the legal line, and the Supreme Court has stated it clearly. “once an alien enters the country, the legal circumstance changes, for the Due Process Clause applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” [0]
As for the First Amendment specifically the Supreme court has reversed the deportation order of an Australian labor activist due to alleged Communist Party affiliation, concluding that “freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country” [1]
The Geneva detail doesn’t apply. He was on US soil as a lawful visa holder when he attended the protest. It’s a question of where he was when the government action targeted his protected expression not where he was when Google emailed him.
His departure doesn’t retroactively strip the constitutional protections that applied when the conduct occurred.
> Yes, someone in customs at an airport can be treated as functionally “at the border” with reduced protections. But you are conflating seeking entry with being present inside the country. That’s the legal line, and the Supreme Court has stated it clearly.
At least in terms of being "at the border", United States v. Martinez-Fuerte would appear to disagree.
That legal line you mention is both figuratively and literally not at the border; protections are weakened up to 100 miles away.
The person in question said he was in Geneva when he received the email from Google. Therefore is a non-US citizen residing outside the country entitled to 1A protections for something they said or did while in the US? I'm not expressing an opinion but I wouldn't take that statement as legal advice.