A federal judge has ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove ankle monitors and drop “intensive” supervision requirements for two farmworkers who were arrested while riding in a van on their way to work in Marion County.
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled Thursday that ICE officers arrested the two last fall without probable cause and violated their due process rights with “reckless and erroneous” actions during and after the arrests.
The two workers, identified only as A.B.D. and C.C.S. in court papers, are both Guatemalan citizens who speak their indigenous language, Mam, and have no understanding of English and only a basic understanding of Spanish, according to Aiken’s ruling. Neither has a criminal history.
The two were riding in a van to work when ICE officers pulled over the van shortly after 5 a.m. on Oct. 30.
The driver and front-seat passenger ran from the van after the officers stopped the vehicle, but A.B.D. and C.C.S. remained in the back seat. They were handcuffed and taken to the ICE office in Portland before being transported to the Northwest Immigration Processing Center in Tacoma.
A day later, they were released from the detention center with ankle monitors and placed under an intensive immigration supervision program that required them to report at least three times a month to the ICE office in Portland.
According to the government’s lawyers, immigration officers had probable cause to detain A.B.D. and C.C.S. because the two passengers admitted they had no legal status in the U.S. The government also argued that the legal challenge was moot since the two workers were released from ICE detention the next day.
One immigration officer said she and her partner had “encountered” the van at about 5:18 a.m. on Oct. 30 and ran its license plate through immigration and criminal databases, and discovered that the registered owner was in the country illegally and faced a deportation order, according to Aiken’s opinion.
According to A.B.D., the ICE officers never asked the 44-year-old his name or about his immigration status or said why he was being arrested when they ordered him out of the van and put him in handcuffs and ankle shackles. Only after they took his photo did they identify him, he said in a sworn declaration.
He said he tried to tell the officers he only spoke Mam but he never got an interpreter. After he was held overnight in Tacoma, he was released the next day once federal officers had him sign papers that he did not understand. They placed a GPS tracking monitor on his ankle and put him on the supervision program, according to the judge’s opinion.
Once he reported to his first ICE check-in with his attorney in Portland in early November, he asked for the ankle monitor to be removed because it hurt his leg when he wore his tall work boots. He was told if he handed over his passport, federal officers would likely remove the monitor, but that did not happen after he gave the officers his passport. The officers also said there was “nothing they could do” to adjust the ankle monitor due to the pain it caused him, the opinion said.
C.C.S., 31, who was in the second row behind the driver’s seat of the van, said she was taken out of the van and handcuffed and not asked her name. She said federal officers at the ICE building in Portland fingerprinted her and then she was taken to the Tacoma detention center, where she stayed overnight and was released the next day after signing papers she couldn’t read and having an ankle monitor placed on her, according to her sworn declaration.
The judge ruled that the ICE officers did not have any justification to stop and arrest either of the two workers and made no individual determinations that either posed a flight risk or a danger to the community.
The section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that the officers cited to support the immediate detentions only applies to noncitizens who are “seeking admission” into the U.S. at the time of arrest, not those already living in the U.S. at the time of arrest, Aiken wrote.
The government’s “attempt to impose mandatory detention” without any hearing on noncitizens who live in the U.S. “guts the due process guarantees that protect noncitizens and citizens alike from reckless and erroneous deprivations of liberty,” Aiken said.
“The undisputed facts show that Petitioners do not, in fact, pose a flight risk or a danger to the community,” the judge found. She noted that both have lived in Oregon for two years and have no criminal history or history of immigration violations. They also lack financial resources that would enable them to flee. They are farmworkers who don’t speak English or Spanish and live in a community with other indigenous Guatemalans.
The judge found that their intense supervision, including GPS monitoring with ankle bracelets and frequent check-ins at the ICE facility in Portland, was unreasonable and done in violation of their Fifth Amendment rights without any due process or notice.
The judge ordered the government to return A.B.D.’s passport, remove the ankle monitors from both, release them from ICE’s “intensive supervision” requirements and place them on parole subject to “reasonable” conditions.
Attorneys for Innovation Law Lab brought the legal challenge. Separately, the nonprofit’s team of lawyers has a broader case pending in federal court that challenges a practice by federal officers of making immigration arrests without warrants in Oregon amid what the attorneys called an “unlawful dragnet” by federal immigration officers in Woodburn and other cities in the state heavily populated by Latino residents.
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