The 6th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is often overlooked, but its few words do serious heavy lifting to ensure your human rights and your freedom. It is because of the 6th Amendment that even if law enforcement officers are mad at you for some reason, they cannot simply grab you and throw you in prison without hope of release. It is why the United States does not have gulags.

The text reads:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Each part of this is vital for maintaining the practical freedom guaranteed to you in American law:

• You cannot be held indefinitely while the government looks for reasons you should be imprisoned for years. So, the United States is not Soviet Russia, or Putin’s Russia.
• The reason for a public trial is that the state must present evidence and so lies will be more easily found out.
• A jury makes the determination of guilt, so that connected political officials or judges cannot target people for their beliefs or ethnicity, or for criticizing those who hold public office.
• The jury must be impartial, or the process is corrupted; this is intended to further limit the ability of the state to rig the proceedings or to get away with presenting false evidence.
• The accused must know the charges and be able to have witnesses against him or her appear to provide testimony.
• The accused must also “have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor” and “have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

So, you cannot be arbitrarily imprisoned. If you are detained after a judicial warrant is issued, based on probable cause, evidence must be presented, and an impartial jury must issue the finding of guilt or innocence. That jury must also be “of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed”. This has suddenly become a major point of contention in the enforcement of immigration laws.

Nearly every day, you can read another story about a person seized by masked ICE agents, who was hauled off in an unmarked vehicle, had no hearing before a judge, and was then transported to a far away detention camp. For instance, a man from the Twin Cities, in Minnesota, who was removed and relocated to a mass detention camp in Texas, more than 1,000 miles away.

There is a reason the Bill of Rights requires you be given a jury trial in the place where you allegedly committed an offense. Actually, there are many reasons.

1. You are entitled to a jury of your peers—people who live as you do, know your community and its values, and wish to ensure that the community is safe. If you have done no wrong, they have no reason to convict you.
2. It is much harder to field the appropriate defense witnesses if the trial is held far away.
3. It is illegal for the government to hold you without charge, without judicial authorization, or indefinitely. Hiding you away in a hard-to-reach mass detention camp, in a different jurisdiction, is a typical tyrant’s trick for denying due process and justice.
4. It quickly becomes difficult for aid groups, rights advocates, lawyers, family members, faith leaders, and other witnesses and law-abiding community leaders, to find and tend to a person, or track what is being done to them, when they are removed to a faraway prison.

The Declaration of Independence highlights how quickly such arbitrary treatment erodes liberty. Among the crimes it attributes to King George III:

• obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither…
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
• For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
• For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments…

Every one of these is linked to the currently ongoing harassment and abuse of the American people by armed paramilitary units claiming to be enforcing immigration laws. The democratic republic of the United States of America was f0unded on the recognition that these acts of tyranny and violent disorder are fundamentally illegitimate.

When you hear a person detained by ICE has been removed from the state where they were found to a mass detention camp in a remote area of Texas, Louisiana, or Florida, ask yourself why the Bill of Rights is not being honored.

• The Secretary of Homeland Security has—without any lawful authority to do so—warned U.S. citizens to be prepared to “prove” their citizenship at any time, at random.
• If you are stopped, or challenged, or just singled out because you look too confident or unafraid, how would you prove your citizenship?
• There are numerous accounts, including nauseating video, of agents demanding proof and then refusing to look at it or accept it, or seeing it and abducting people into unconstitutional extrajudicial custody anyway, sometimes using extreme violence to do so.
• If agents do not get a warrant signed by an independent federal judge, if they do not make a formal arrest but just snatch people into unmarked vehicles, if a detained person can be removed to a mass detention camp with no due process, never seeing a judge, never speaking to a lawyer…
• How would you prevent this crime against the Constitution from becoming a crime that unlawfully deprives you of liberty?
• More than 170 U.S. citizens are confirmed to have been unlawfully abducted and held against their will be ICE agents, who claim the Bill of Rights is irrelevant.

The human rights of people being targeted by ICE are also your human rights. If federal agents are able to get away with denying their human rights, then they are in fact, in real time, denying yours. These abuses are crimes—against the victims, against the Constitution, against all of us. No one in government has lawful authority to promote or condone them—before, during, or after.