On November 21 at 530 AM, @ICEgov officers were hanging out in a hallway in a residential building popular among Central American families in NW DC. They didn’t seem to be looking for anyone in particular.
A man opened the door to his apartment to go to work at 530 when he found the officers in the hall. They did not know his name but demanded entrance into his apartment.
They then demanded documents from everyone in the apartment. They were not looking for anyone in particular but seemed to enter this apartment because this guy was the first to leave for the day. Eight or nine ICE officers entered this one apartment.
They had portable fingerprint scanners and made everyone run their prints, including my client. He had a fingerprint history due to an arrest from a decade earlier. Those charges were dismissed. When he could not prove that he was here legally, he was arrested by ICE.
He was charged with entering the country illegally in 2001 and placed into ICE detention without bond. Reminder: there is no criminal history here. Yet, detention was deemed appropriate.
This man has worked for 15 years for a well known restaurant group. They reached out to me to send me to the jail on a Sunday to see what could be done. I met him on Sunday November 24 and decided I could help and would ask for a hearing in court to obtain his release on bond.
The restaurant group agreed to pay for this. On Monday 25, I prepared a bond request and Fedexed it to the immigration court in Arlington VA. It arrived on Tuesday November 26.
I did not expect much action that week with Thanksgiving. But what I did not expect was that I would be waiting 18 days later to get a hearing date.
I have called at least 15 times. The person who handles was out. The phone does not get answered. I have left at least half a dozen messages. No one has called me back.
There is no urgency to provide a court hearing for a man who is detained. You get arrested for a crime and get a bail hearing within a few days. Get arrested for a civil violation and it takes at least 18 days to get on the calendar.
ICE has not filed the paperwork to start removal proceedings yet. But this guy is detained- in a real jail- without any charges filed in court and with no ability to get a hearing.
And he has a lawyer. A pretty good one. The system chews people up and depends upon the indifference of the officials to a man’s incarceration.
This whole thing was a clusterf*** from the beginning. But the nightmare is that the court system is completely disinterested and incapable of providing any semblance of justice.
