The U.S. government is withholding information about a series of immigration raids in January that led to the arrest and deportation proceedings of more than 100 Central American women and children seeking asylum in the country, according to a new complaint.
The complaint, filed by the civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the law firm Alston & Bird, alleges that federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents used deceptive tactics to gain entry into immigrants’ homes and take them into custody. These people were then sent to a family immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas.
In some cases, agents told immigrants that they were looking for a criminal suspect, showing a photo of an African American man and asking to look for him inside their homes. In other cases, according to the lawsuit, ICE agents weren’t upfront about what was going on and claimed “they were only taking the immigrants into custody for a short time to examine the women’s electronic ankle shackles,” which are used to monitor some women while they wait for their court hearings. The agents reportedly did not show copies of warrants — required to enter any home without valid consent — and told people to “be quiet” when they were asked to produce one.
The SPLC filed a complaint after the agency failed to release documents following a January 7 request, just days after the initial raids took place on January 2 and 3. The records sought by the SPLC would show how and why ICE pursued the immigrants who were taken in the raid.
Until we can review the records, the possibility of justice for these immigrants will be out of reach.
“Until we can review the records, the possibility of justice for these immigrants will be out of reach,” David Gann, senior associate at Alston & Bird, the SPLC’s co-counsel, said in an emailed press release. “It is important for DHS and ICE to release their files on these raids.”
At the end of last year, the Obama administration authorized a series of raids under Operation Border Guardian targeting Central American mothers and children living in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. The raids were in response to a large increase of immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala showing up on the southern U.S. border saying that they needed to seek asylum from escaping gang violence. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said that immigration agents would only go after border crossers who came to the country after 2014 and have failed to win their asylum cases.
But that’s not exactly how it played out in practice. According to the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project, some of the people scooped in raids had bona fide asylum claims “but were deprived of a meaningful opportunity to present them at their hearings in immigration court,” according to a January press release. CARA successfully halted the deportation of four sets of Central American families who fell into this category.
What’s more, the complaint’s allegations of ICE’s deceptive tactics track with what other immigrants and advocates have told ThinkProgress over the past several months.
For instance, immigration agents told Rene, the brother of a recent Central American border crosser, that they needed to search his home for a “wanted man” before they detained his sister and children. And despite established guidelines to avoid detaining and arresting immigrants at sensitive locations like churches, hospitals, and schools, agents violated those policies at a church and school bus stops in January.
Over the past several years, as more Central American families and unaccompanied children have arrived at the southern U.S. border, the government has made it increasingly difficult for them to be released into the country, even when they have sponsors. Bail bonds are often set at impossibly high prices, making it hard for people to pay their way out of detention centers. And both accompanied and unaccompanied children — who before 2014 were released to sponsors in the United States — have been continuously kept in detention facilities, likely in violation of a 1997 court case that bars children from being kept in restrictive settings.