One element of the Justice Department’s seizure of Elian Gonzalez that has received scant attention is the search warrant that Janet Reno has cited as giving her authority to raid the home. Charges were aired on television that the government had no authority to enter the home, since it had not obtained a court order authorizing it. Then it turned out that the Justice Department had obtained a search warrant from a federal magistrate judge in Florida authorizing a search of the house.

That was disclosed by INS Commissioner Doris Meissner when she appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation the next day. Asked what they were searching for, she replied, “The boy.” Miami attorney Jack Thompson had a column in NewsMax.com in which he said, “The government, knowing they couldn’t get an order authorizing the forced taking of the boy, went to a lowly magistrate and got a useless search warrant, useless legally, but useful on Sunday talk shows so that they could falsely but plausibly say that they had a ?court-ordered search warrant’ authorizing the raid.”

Thompson noted that Bob Schieffer, the host of the show, understood that what the INS did was not conduct a search. They went into the home to seize the boy to deliver him to the custody of his father. Thompson described this as “the first change of custody in American history without a court order and at the point of a gun.”

Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe is as liberal as Thompson is conservative, but he agrees on this point. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, he wrote, “The Justice Department points out that agents who stormed the Miami home were armed not only with guns, but with a search warrant. But it was not a warrant to seize the child. Elian was not lost, and it is a semantic sleight of hand to compare his forcible removal to the seizure of evidence, which is what a search warrant is for.”

To obtain the warrant the Justice Department had to tell the magistrate that Elian was “a concealed person,” meaning that he was being hidden and that they did not know where he was. Thompson asks, “Did not everyone on the planet know where the boy was?” He said, “Elian’s whereabouts were not concealed. They were known to an absolute certainty. Which is why the search warrant was illegally obtained and void, thereby rendering the taking of the boy illegal.”

What makes this even worse was the revelation by Senator Bob Smith, the Republican from New Hampshire who has been Elian’s greatest champion, that the Justice Department had also obtained a warrant for the arrest of Elian. The senator disclosed this on the Fox News program, Hannity and Colmes on April 24, reading from the warrant. Apparently, the Justice Department obtained this as a fall-back in case a lawyer in the house barred their entry on the grounds that the search warrant was invalid. Lawrence Tribe concluded his article in The New York Times with this comment: “Ms. Reno’s decision to take the law as well as the child into her own hands seems worse than political blunder….Her decision strikes at the heart of constitutional government and shakes the safeguards of liberty.”

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