When I left my office in the Licht Judicial Complex Tuesday afternoon it was the end of a work day like any other. When I turned on the radio Wednesday I learned that the end of my work day was the beginning of a nightmare for dozens of other courthouse workers. Tuesday, the Rhode Island State Police teamed up with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to raid six courthouses throughout the state in search of undocumented workers.

Throughout history, when mass arrests occur, the careful processes which give our legal system its integrity are inevitably lost in a rush of tired bodies, overwhelmed emotions and recycled political rhetoric. We have repeatedly heard the shrill cries of anti-immigrant advocates everywhere from Congress to our State House announcing the perils of immigration: they steal our jobs, they suck our taxes, they fill our prisons. I am sure that we will be hearing much of the same in the coming days about the people who clean our courthouses, including my office.

I could not be more sickened by this brutal display of misguided policymaking. The rampant scapegoating of immigrants needs to stop. It is ineffectual as a policy position and violates basic norms of decency.

Immigrant scapegoating — and the mass arrests which follow — has occurred throughout this nation’s history, although its racial and ethnic targets have shifted over time. The inauguration of the modern immigration law system, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, did not even attempt to conceal its blatantly racist goal. Later, the immigrant wave shifted toward southern and eastern Europe — including the Italian immigrants who contributed so much to Rhode Island — and the exclusions and deportations turned in that direction.

Courts have long enabled politicians to target immigrants. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that Congress and the president can do almost anything they want when it comes to admission, exclusion and naturalization. And in moments of economic or political crises, politicians have been all too willing to use the court’s leeway.

Tuesday night’s raid, however, was more disturbing. If the court spokesperson, Craig N. Berke, was quoted accurately in Wednesday’s Journal article (Raids at 6 courthouses target illegal immigrants, by staff writers Karen Lee Ziner and Felice Freyer), then this raid was initiated by the judiciary. In early June, Berke is quoted as saying, the judiciary forwarded some “evidence” to ICE and the state police. Since then the court system has been working “on a daily basis” with those law enforcement agencies, presumably culminating in [Tuesday’s] raids.

The collaboration in which the Rhode Island court system engaged in is only a more explicit version of courts’ continual willingness to work with law enforcement to target immigrants. In the dark hours of the Palmer Raids — that now infamous affair in which tens of thousands of people were rounded up for deportation for no other reason than that they allegedly held radical political beliefs — J. Edgar Hoover ordered that the Department of Labor (then in charge of deportation) be kept open late so that the detainees could be summarily deported.

And last month in Postville, Iowa, a federal court moved its offices to a cattle pen and conducted fast-track, marathon proceedings against hundreds of individuals who were handcuffed, shackled and addressed in groups of 10 — forgetting the judicial premise that every individual deserves individualized attention and careful consideration of their plight.

The Rhode Island judiciary’s cooperation in this affair — instigation, even — is an embarrassing instance of judicial duplicity in our country’s recurring demonization of immigrants. When those of us who work in the judiciary activate the gears of anti-immigrant repression, we belie the veil of impartiality with which we cloak ourselves.

No longer can the courts of this state be considered a dignified space for the airing of grievances. Instead, after [Tuesday’s] raids, our courthouses have devolved into one more location that so many of our community members must avoid. How can courts expect the cooperation of all of us who are undocumented, have friends or family who are undocumented, or, in the words of a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision enabling immigration officers to engage in racial profiling, look to be “of apparent Mexican ancestry”?

Rhode Island’s courts have no business enforcing immigration laws. Immigration is wholly the responsibility of the federal government, including the immigration court system and the federal courts. When the judiciary opened its doors to the rushing boots of immigration officers, it ceased to be a neutral mediator of legal disputes and became an active agent of exclusion.

[Tuesday], the state judiciary announced with handcuffs and sirens that some members of our community ought not turn to our state courts to tackle crime, enforce child support orders or any of the innumerable other issues which are rightfully considered by our courts every day. In doing so, it sullied its proud motto: justice, independence, honor.