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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsICE claimed a Dreamer was "gang-affiliated" and tried to deport him. A federal judge ruled ICE LIED.
I have to wonder how many Dreamers do not get their day in Court.
Bad Liars
ICE claimed a Dreamer was gang-affiliated and tried to deport him. A federal judge ruled that ICE was lying.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/federal-judge-accused-ice-of-making-up-evidence-to-prove-that-dreamer-was-gang-affiliated.html
By Mark Joseph Stern
May 16, 20185:18 PM
An undocumented immigrant is frisked by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), officer after arriving to an ICE processing center on April 11, 2018 at the U.S. Federal Building in lower Manhattan, New York City.
An undocumented immigrant is frisked by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer after arriving to an ICE processing center on April 11 at the U.S. federal building in lower Manhattan, New York City.
John Moore/Getty Images
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez shot down the federal governments efforts to strip Daniel Ramirez Medina of his DACA status. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had arrested and detained Ramirez last year, then falsely claimed that he was affiliated with a gang and attempted to deport him. He filed suit, alleging that ICE had violated his due process rights. Martinez agreed. His order barred the federal government from voiding Ramirezs DACA status, safeguarding his ability to live and work in the United States legally for the foreseeable future. What may be most remarkable about Martinezs decision, though, is its blunt repudiation of ICEs main claimthat Ramirez is gang-affiliated. The judge did not simply rule against ICE. He accused the agency of lying to a court of law.
The facts of Ramirezs case are extremely disturbing. In February 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump unleashed immigration agents to amp up arrests and deportations, ICE agents went to Ramirezs fathers house in Seattle to arrest him. (The father is undocumented, and brought Ramirez to the U.S. illegally as a child.) While there, they encountered Ramirez and asked him whether he was legally here. He responded that he wasa truthful statement given his DACA status, which he had renewed the previous May. Yet ICE officers detained him anyway. They took him to a processing center, where, once again, he told them that he had work permit.
It doesnt matter, an agent responded, because you werent born in this country.
ICE then interrogated Ramirez, fingerprinted and booked him, confiscated his work permit, sent him to a detention center, and placed him in removal proceedings. It also purported to revoke his DACA status, subjecting him to imminent deportation. Typically, the government may not rescind an individuals DACA status without giving the beneficiary an opportunity to contest its decision. But ICE claimed that Ramirezs DACA benefits could be terminated automatically because he presented an egregious public safety concern due to his alleged gang affiliation. (ICE routinely alleges that Latino immigrants with no indication of gang affiliation are members of a gang in order to detain and deport them.)
A group of renowned attorneys then stepped in to defend Ramirez, arguing that virtually every action ICE had taken against their client was unlawful. They also alleged that ICEs key claimthat Ramirez is gang-affiliatedwas a complete falsehood. One of his lawyers, Mark Rosenbaum, presented evidence indicating that ICE had doctored Ramirezs statement by erasing words he had written in the pencil provided to make it seem as if he had confessed to being in a gang. (The original statement asserts he has no gang affiliation.) During his initial interrogation, ICE officers asked him five times whether he belonged to a gang, and he repeatedly said no. Instead, he asserted that he had fled California [to Washington] to escape from the gangs. .........................................
Link to tweet
Gothmog
(145,063 posts)jmowreader
(50,551 posts)"Out of control" implies ICE doesn't know what it's doing. Nothing could be more wrong. ICE knows EXACTLY what it's doing - creating an extreme state of fear in the populace. Trump wants this. He wants to scare every immigrant out of the country, and scare people who aren't US citizens out of the idea of coming here even on vacation.
Bernardo de La Paz
(48,988 posts)First they came for the immigrant gang members.
Then they came for the Dreamers.
Then they will come for the LGBTQ.
Then they will come for the media that don't genuflect for tRump.
Then they will come for you.
erronis
(15,219 posts)I actually interviewed for a job with ICE several years ago (Obama era) but am so glad they thought I wasn't fit for the type of job they had.
I wish I could say that a Democratic executive would be much more humanist than the W/dump regimes but I know there were a lot of abuses of power in all presidencies that I remember (only back through Truman.)
geardaddy
(24,926 posts)Hekate
(90,627 posts)pazzyanne
(6,546 posts)I live in a small, very rural area and on the way to the grocery store last week I followed a pickup truck with an "ICE Team" sticker in the rear window. I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I seem to have that feeling a lot these days.
grantcart
(53,061 posts)Under Obama however ICE spent most of its resources working in prisons and jails to identify violent criminals in the prison system who were not citizens so that they could deport them.
Now they have more autonomy and some ICE offices are hitting the streets, others continue working in the prisons.
Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)Last edited Thu May 17, 2018, 03:58 PM - Edit history (1)
From the end of the article:
So it does nothing to stop the lying agents, but it is going to hinder future illegal deportations.
grantcart
(53,061 posts)For the Border Patrol the bar for any kind of false statement is immediate termination.
Last month a Border Patrol Agent in Douglas Arizona was not just terminated but put under arrest for making a false statement.
The Agent was a 10 year veteran of the Border Patrol. Once a year the Border Patrol requires all of its agents to fill out a standard questionnaire and one of the questions is "how many times did you cross the border and leave the United States"?
He put down 17. Like many Custom and ICE Officers and Agents his wife is a Mexican national and they have a separate residence across the border with their in laws. It is especially common for Customs agents in Calexico who prefer to live across the border in Mexicali, a more sophisticated urban living environment at half the cost of the miserable town of Calexico.
This agent had crossed more than 50 times and when he handed in his report he was arrested and put in hand cuffs. In Customs and ICE they would have been unlikely to ask the question but if they discovered a misstatement like this the officer might have gotten 1 week docked pay.
For the Douglas Agent the dropped the charges when he resigned his position.
By the way most ICE agents, especially along the border, are not racists but either naturalized Americans or come from second generation immigrant families. A very large number of these agents would have fit the "Dreamer" category but their families were able to regularize their status during the Reagan amnesty or through other legal avenues.
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)I'm not as worried about the individual agents as much as making up ridiculous excuses to deport. In other words, it's the system that now incentivizes this behavior (and that does have to do with racist support for mass deportations of perfectly legal citizens). My point here is that the judge's finding delegitimizes the bogus ICE arrests and exposes the racism on which tRump's new deportation push is predicated.
suffragette
(12,232 posts)for their labor while they are held there.
Its a nightmare system, engineered to degrade, abuse and make profit from the most vulnerable.
K&R for this very important OP.