The Obama-Bush Police State

A reader writes:

I've appreciated your police state posts lately, especially the one today related to immigration.  I'm an immigration lawyer, so I see this kind of stuff happening all the time. One small point on that - immigrants facing charges from ICE do have the right to an attorney (though that right was put in jeopardy by Mukasey and mostly rescued by Holder), but, unlike criminal defendants, do not have the right to have the government provide an attorney if the immigrant can't afford one.  That means it is perfectly possible to go to jail (immigration detainees are almost always housed with criminals in the same jails used to punish criminal offenders) without having access to an attorney.

I hope you'll continue to blog about the many ways Americans have allowed their country to begin evolving into a police state. I fear it may already too late to rouse the outrage of the masses at the tremendous power grab we've seen starting with Bush and continuing under Obama, but I believe those of us who still value our civil liberties should at least try.

I backed Obama because I believed he wanted to roll some of this back. It increasingly appears that I was wrong. The 9/11 police state is with us. Obama is slowly legitimizing it, despite being elected to unwind it. This country is no longer as free as many others in the world - and unrecognizable compared with the free country I found in 1984. And it's getting less free every day. I expected this if Giuliani or McCain got elected. But Obama? Watching him continue their policies in so many ways is somehow even more painful.