Immigrant Class Action Suit in MA Expands

• Author: Chris Remington
• Posted: 2024-05-24

America has long been known as a country where you can sue for just about anything. The idea of the law is stretched thin throughout the USA, and it all mostly depends on what your politics are, or what sort of civil standards are set. After all, America is the country where a woman was awarded millions of dollars because coffee was hot. Many remember that case: A woman purchased a coffee from McDonald's, spilled it on herself, and somehow it was McDonald's fault. That is a microcosm of America's civil law. So, when people hear that a civil rights group from Boston is trying to sue multiple parties due to immigrants being flown to Martha's Vineyard, no one is really shocked at all. America is a country where the idea of the law has been replaced by dollar signs. This case in particular stands as a great example of how class action lawsuits are too often abused.

In September, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed that he would not allow any further illegal immigrants to be flown into his state by the Biden administration. In order to stop the planes from dropping off immigrants in Florida, DeSantis coordinated a plane to drop nearly 50 immigrants off in Martha's Vineyard - a rich island community that claims immigrants are always welcome. However, within 24 hours of the immigrants arriving in the Vineyard, the supposedly compassionate residents there literally called in the armed forces to have the immigrants removed. While there for a night, the citizens of Martha's Vineyard, who are worth an average of $6 million per resident, fed the immigrants boxed cereal, cheap snack cakes, and made them all sleep in a makeshift polio hospice, before frantically helping to round them up.

This was all on the news for weeks. Everyone knows this is what happened and there is no exaggeration here. The matter of opinion comes in whether or not one thinks that DeSantis did something to violate the civil rights of people who aren't American citizens. That's the issue on which a civil rights group from Boston is trying to focus, as they immediately filed a lawsuit against Ron DeSantis and are now including other parties in that suit. The suit has been expanded to a federal class action and is now including the airline that DeSantis paid to fly the immigrants north, and also all of the employees who work there.

In other words, this group of lawyers filing the suit has decided that everyone involved violated the civil rights of immigrants that they repeatedly refer to as "Latinx" in the filings. Not by their names, not by their actual country of original, but "Latinx." This is an obvious political stunt, and everyone knows it. The question now becomes: Will a federal civil court change years of precedent just to make a political statement?
 

American Courts Hold Too Much Power

It certainly wouldn't be the first time that a court in America exercised its power for political purposes. Americans have been dealing with this since George W. Bush and his Neocon-stacked courts gave the okay to spy on Americans with the Patriot Act. Every administration since then has used the courts to advance their policies, with no exception. It's at the point now in America where courts have more power than elected politicians. Whether you believe the 2020 election had fraud in it or not, it's a fact that courts refused to hear the cases. They simply outright refused. That was something new for America. The courts are supposed to hear such cases. Now the courts get to pick and choose which cases they hear based on their politics.

It goes both ways. The Supreme Court was stacked and Roe V Wade was overturned. Whatever you feel about that, it's a fact that the court was stacked for such a precedent. The same goes with federal courts hearing civil cases in areas like Massachusetts. They have all the power here to dictate that over 200 years of law is invalid. The law says that non-citizens do not have protections as American citizens. The Civil Rights act did not change that either. However, a federal court has unilaterally decided that, yes, non-citizens do have civil rights, and thus a case filed on their behalf is valid.

Wherever you stand on the issue of the immigrants being flown to Martha's Vineyard instead of to Florida, the issue on the table is about the courts making up their own rules on a case by case basis. This can open up a whole new can of worms for civil lawsuits going forward.