Judge Restricts Immigration Arrests In DC
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A federal judge on Dec. 2 ordered the Trump administration to stop making warrantless immigration arrests in the District of Columbia without probable cause.
Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the plaintiffs made a strong case that immigration officers have been arresting immigrants without warrants or conducting assessments to determine if each individual poses a flight risk.
Federal law states that an officer can arrest an immigrant without a warrant “if he has reason to believe that the alien so arrested is in the United States in violation of any such law or regulation and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.”
“Defendants’ systemic failure to apply the probable cause standard, including the failure to consider escape risk, directly violates the clear statutory requirement,” as well as Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regulations implementing the law, Howell said in an 88-page decision.
Howell ordered the Department of Homeland Security and its divisions, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to stop making warrantless arrests without an individualized determination of whether the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained and that the person being arrested “is in the United States in violation of law or regulation regulating the admission, exclusion, expulsion or removal of aliens.”
The Department of Justice, which represents agencies in legal cases, and the DHS did not return requests for comment on the ruling.
CASA, a Maryland-based organization that sued along with individuals who have been arrested in the nation’s capital in recent months by immigration officers, did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit stated that federal agents have been “indiscriminately arresting without warrants and without probable cause District residents whom the agents perceive to be Latino” without warrants and without individualized assessments that those being arrested are illegally in the United States or likely to escape before agents can obtain a warrant.
“In some cases, officials belatedly realize that there is no legal basis to hold in custody the individual whom federal agents arrested without any individualized assessment and release them,” it stated. “Even those released from detention experience significant physical and psychological harm from their arbitrary arrest and detention, and they fear that they will experience those harms again.”
Federal officials said in court filings that, in carrying out President Donald Trump’s order to make the District of Columbia safer, they have been arresting people identified as being illegally in the country, and that Howell should not enter a preliminary injunction.
“Plaintiffs assert that ICE has a pattern and practice of acting otherwise, but that evidence consists of their individual arrest experiences, pseudonymous third-party anecdotes, and third-party statements by immigration attorneys,” officials stated. “At most, those declarations describe varying, unconnected encounters, not an official, routinely applied, district-wide warrantless arrest pattern and practice. Plaintiffs thus have not even shown an unlawful law enforcement policy—let alone that they face a ’real and immediate' threat of being harmed by it.”
Earlier this year, a federal judge in Colorado and a federal judge in California issued similar rulings. Another judge in California ordered officers not to stop people based on factors such as race. The Supreme Court put that order on hold.
