Judge Tears Into Trump for ICE’s Massive Due Process Violations
A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants attending immigration court violates their due process rights.
In a scathing opinion released Thursday, Judge Dale E. Ho wrote that ICE arrests in immigration court had turned the procedure into “detention roulette.”
Over the span of 31 pages, Ho wrote that Carlos Javier Lopez Benitez, a 27-year-old from Paraguay, had his constitutional rights violated when he attended court on July 16 in pursuit of asylum.
“Mr. Lopez Benitez appears to be far from alone,” Ho wrote. “His counsel assert that his treatment is part of a ‘nationwide campaign,’ as set forth in an ICE internal memo that has been described in various media reports, which suggests that millions could be swept up in the same way.”
Since May, ICE agents have been arresting immigrants immediately after their immigration court hearings. The strategy has gained nationwide attention in the wake of two high-profile consequences: the indictment of a judge in Wisconsin who allegedly helped an immigrant evade authorities outside her courtroom, and the detention of New York City Comptroller and then-mayoral hopeful Brad Lander, who was attempting to escort an immigrant out of the courthouse.
Ho noted that while the government could not confirm or deny the existence of that policy, they “appear to maintain that they must categorically detain all undocumented immigrants who they believe have entered the United States unlawfully—no matter how long they have been residing in the country since.”
Citing Velasco Lopez v. Decker, Ho further argued that the “suggestion that government agents may sweep up any person they wish” for no reason whatsoever, “so long as the person will, at some unknown point in time, be allowed to ask some other official for his or her release offends the ordered system of liberty that is the pillar of the Fifth Amendment.”
Lopez Benitez’s case may be the new normal in Trump’s America, but it is far from the historical standard. Immigration authorities used to stay away from courthouses, fearing that their presence could disengage people from following procedure and navigating the legal system. But White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s agenda has effectively unrooted that, tasking federal agents with arresting 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—a quota so astronomical that it has forced the agency to find unconventional subjects of detention that include legal residents and even U.S. citizens.