Two more people seeking asylum showed up for immigration court hearings in Portland on Tuesday only to have the government dismiss their cases and then face immediate arrest by federal agents, according to court records.
It marked the second week of arrests at Portland Immigration Court and expanded to include people seeking asylum from Venezuela and Ecuador.
The most recent arrests prompted a federal judge to order the government to keep the asylum-seekers in Oregon, or if they had already been transferred out of state, to inform the court within two hours of the judge’s order and explain why their moves were necessary.
“It is alarming that ICE and the administration are disregarding the longstanding protections in place for asylum seekers in an effort to conduct mass deportations’” Isa Peña, director of strategy at Innovation Law Lab, said in a statement. “Even when we have attorneys at the courthouse, ready to intervene, ICE is literally racing to grab people and disappear them from their families and communities.”
The two people arrested Tuesday were a 43-year-old Venezuelan man who fled his home country out of fear of persecution for his political beliefs in October 2024, and a 45-year-old man who fled Ecuador in August 2023 after being kidnapped and threatened with death by an organized criminal group called Los Choneros, according to their court petitions.
The Venezuelan man, identified only as J.C.R.M., entered the United States at El Paso, Texas, according to a petition filed in court. He was released from custody, though the federal government started removal proceedings against him. He moved to Oregon and successfully had his immigration removal case moved to immigration court in Portland.
He applied for asylum in April and appeared for a scheduled immigration court hearing on Tuesday. Instead of allowing his asylum application to proceed, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials moved to dismiss his case and the court approved. After leaving the courtroom, ICE agents arrested him, without any opportunity to challenge the arrest, according to attorney, Stephen W. Manning.
The man from Ecuador, identified only as N.E.M.B., arrived in the U.S. at the San Diego border crossing in August 2023. He was arrested by the Department of Homeland Security and released from custody the next day. Removal proceedings were initiated and he appeared for a scheduled immigration court hearing Tuesday but his asylum application case was also suddenly thrown out. ICE agents waiting in the courtroom lobby then arrested him.
Both men’s petitions, filed in U.S. District Court in Portland on Tuesday, contend that the government violated their due process rights and misconstrued a Jan. 20 executive action by President Trump called “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The order instructed the Homeland Security secretary “to take all appropriate action to enable” ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to “prioritize civil immigration enforcement procedures including through the use of mass detention,” according to the petitions.
Trump’s executive order, however, does not apply to noncitizens who were in the U.S. before its effective date, argued Manning, who is representing both men.
Last week, authorities cited the same executive order when arresting two 24-year-old asylum seekers from Mexico. Their arrests occurred days apart but were conducted in the same manner, marking the first such courthouse arrests in Portland under the Trump administration.
After one of the two, a transgender woman, said she feared persecution and torture if she were sent back to Mexico and her petition challenging her arrest was filed in federal court in Portland, her file was referred for what’s called a “credible fear interview,” according to Chatham McCutcheon, supervisory detention and deportation officer for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Portland.
Although she already had been moved out of Oregon and detained in Tacoma, McCutcheon wrote to a federal judge last Thursday that ICE will no longer seek her immediate removal from the U.S. until an evaluation of her reported fear of going back to Mexico is done. Meanwhile, she was to remain in custody.
The asylum seekers had properly filed their asylum applications and were entitled to full hearings before immigration judges with the right to legal representation, to present evidence and to appeal an adverse decision, according to Jordan Cunnings, another lawyer who also is representing the asylum seekers arrested in Portland.
By dismissing their cases and attempting to place them in a fast-track deportation process with minimal protections, Cunnings argued, ICE stripped them of fundamental constitutional safeguards.
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