Elián González has been mentioned in a post and a link within a post, in connection with Presidential powers and the constitution:

'Are you saying, though, this provision you just described where rogue agents can steal into somebody's house under cover of darkness like the Clintons did in the family of Elian Gonzales down in Florida? They can sneak in there and steal items out of a house? That's in the new version of the Patriot Act that was not in the old version?' www.rushlimbaugh.com

'Elian Gonzales-Sending the Secret Service to snatch the boy from the home of the relatives he was staying. Doing this in the midle of the night' answerpool.com

But what was the constitutional issue?

'Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the return of Elián to his father and set a deadline of April 13, 2000, but the Miami relatives defied the order. Negotiations continued for several days as the house was surrounded by protesters as well as police. The relatives insisted on guarantees that they could live with the child for several months, retain custody, and that Elián would not be returned to Cuba. Negotiations carried on throughout the night, but Reno claimed that the relatives rejected all workable solutions. A federal family court judge revoked Lázaro's temporary custody order, clearing the way for Elián to be returned to his father's custody. On April 20, Reno made the decision to remove Elián Gonzalez from the house and instructed law enforcement officials to determine the best time to intercept the boy.

In the pre-dawn hours of April 22, eight SWAT-equipped INS agents burst into Lázaro's home. A photograph by Alan Diaz of the Associated Press (for which he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography) shows an INS agent with a MP5 submachine gun apparently pointed at terrified Elián and Donato Dalrymple (one of the fishermen who had found him). The INS agent later claimed that the weapon wasn't pointed at González, and that it only appeared that way from the camera angle. INS also claimed in the days after the raid that they had identified as many as two dozen persons who were "prepared to thwart any government operation" and also had concealed weapons permits and criminal records.'
en.wikipedia.org

The police tactics may or may not have been over the top - but that's a question of how best to stay in control of such an explosive situation, isn't it? A social worker with a piece of paper wouldn't have cut it. Constitutionally, the boy was to be removed from his relatives, and eventually returned to his father somehow.

Here's another view critical of the Clinton administration's actions in this case - www.mcsm.org. It quotes Amendment IV...

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

...and has a lot of emotional language about 'jackbooted thugs' and 'locked and loaded machine guns', but what was actually illegal, not just aggressive, in the police action?

That website also suggests that 'There is even some question as to whether a warrant was obtained'. But there was one - More on That Elián Search Warrant:

'Chatterbox phoned Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar, a Fourth Amendment scholar who generally believes warrants "are dangerous things" because they can give government officials too much power, to ask him about the constitutional issues raised by the Elián warrant. Amar said that Tribe is initiating "a good conversation. ... Warrants and seizures, when you go in on your own, are more intrusive than, say, a subpoena." But he said he thought Tribe was wrong, and the INS was right, on the technical question of whether this particular warrant was constitutional. In response to Tribe's argument that the INS ought to have gotten a court order of contempt--it did request one, but was denied--Amar said that the INS might plausibly argue: "We were afraid, we had good reason to think if we simply served the subpoena they were going to hide the kid or they were going to make themselves martyrs and say, 'You can put me in jail, but you're not getting the kid.' " Which would have been counterproductive, Amar explained, since the government's goal was not to put any member of the González family in jail, but rather to retrieve Elián. Indeed, in today's Washington Post, Karen DeYoung reports that the INS had a lot more to fear than that the Gonzálezes might hide Elián. The INS says it had evidence that the five bodyguards providing "close-in security for the Gonzalez family and Elián" were armed. All five had concealed weapons permits, and one of the five was actually seen by a government informer carrying a gun inside the González house.'

Wasn't there 'probable cause' - Elian's relatives being in open defiance of the law - a legal and appropriate warrant, and some justification (maybe) for an armed approach by the police?

What's the constitutional issue?

Having been the one to mention this topic on another thread, I will take a stab at this subject.

My feelings on this is that immediately after recovering the boy and taking him to be examined by medical personnel, the State Department should have been making arrangements with the Cuban Government on sending him back home to his Father.

Instead, Elian Gonzales American relatives come & take him in. Basically the boy developed a family relationship with them. A family who was concerned with his welfare. A family who bent over backwards not to allow him being sent back to his home country under a Communist dictatorship. What disgusted me more than anything is Bill Clinton kissing Fidel Castro on the behind in the process of transferring the boy to his Cuban family.

Now what portion of the Constitution might apply in the behalf of the Gonzales family???

perhaps this:

Amendment IV - Search and seizure.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

NNN-In your opening post you certainly do make some valid points. Especially the fact, the Gonzales family did violate a court order to turn the boy over to Government officials-probable cause.

Yet the manner the boy was taken into custody was certainly not right either. And I have to wonder what people around the world thought when they heard about this?? Especially if they were able to catch any of the TV news coverage that we get...

I guess (only guessing) that most people felt that, in the end, the boy should be with his father. I remember that coverage in the UK tended to portray the US relatives as anti-communist fanatics. For most people around the world, Cuba is just another country with an objectionable government, not an especially demonised dictatorship.

For people in the US, it seemed to be a dilemma about which was worse - growing up in Cuba or being separated from your remaining parent.

Actually, growing up in Cuba doesn't seem to have been so bad, for Elian - What happened to Elian Gonzalez?

The manner in which he was taken from his Florida relatives was extraordinary, to put it mildly; but that's a question of police tactics, rather than constitutional issues. They had a warrant, and the permission to carry out 'search and seizure' was reasonable, even if the method finally used was questionable.

If anyone openly defied court orders to do anything, and had armed bodyguards in their house to help prevent it happening, they might expect an armed police response as a possibility. Maybe that's also a peculiarly US viewpoint though - that having handguns in the house is natural. What would anything short of a SWAT team have achieved in this case? Sometimes (as in Gulf War I, or rugby tackles) it's safest all round to go in as hard and aggressively as possible, taking control. (Gulf War II demonstrates the consequences of half-measures.)

Should the family have been waited out? That's certainly what I would have done - but then, I'm a bed-wetting liberal chicken.

When you get down to it, Elián González was nothing more than a pawn in the game of power politics. The expatriate community of Little Havana wanted to flex its muscles. What it didn't realize was that the power they might have exerted in Miami did not extend beyond there. Elián's Florida family was so disfunctional as to be unbelieveable. The uncle appeard half-soused the whole time. The cousin...well, forget about her. This was the home people wanted him to live in?