Twelve immigrants and their legal advocates filed a class action lawsuit on Wednesday against the Trump administration, alleging that the justice department and the Department of Homeland Security colluded to arrest and deport potentially thousands of people at their immigration hearings.
A coalition of immigrant advocacy groups – including the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Legal Education and Services (RAICES), National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), Democracy Forward and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCRSF) – filed the suit on behalf of 12 plaintiffs, the majority of whom were seeking protection in the US from anti-LGBTQ+ violence or female genital mutilation.
In May, federal authorities began arresting people at US immigration courts from New York and Arizona to Washington state in what appeared to be a coordinated operation. The following month, New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested while attending immigration court with one migrant. Since then, the supreme court has granted the Trump administration permission to deport migrants to countries they are not from, including to conflict-ridden places such as South Sudan.
“The Trump administration has cast an unconscionably wide net to ensnare people and families who attend immigration court hearings in compliance with their legal obligations, only to face life-threatening imprisonment, swift removal and the prospect of indefinite family separation,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at RAICES. “The egregious and unprecedented coordination amongst government agencies that we are witnessing not only inflicts irreparable harm upon infants and adults alike for seeking refuge in the US, but also establishes a chilling precedent in which law and order are abandoned in favor of stoking widespread panic and fear – leaving the entire American public at risk, regardless of immigration status.”
The lawsuit asserts that the Trump administration “stripped people of basic due process rights afforded under US immigration law and the fifth amendment in order to place them in expedited removal proceedings and deport them without hearings”, the plaintiffs said in a press release.
All twelve of the plaintiffs were arrested at immigration hearings where they were requesting asylum or other legal protection to remain in the US. All but two remain in detention. One was already deported to Ecuador where he is now living in hiding due to his advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights.
Some of the plaintiffs had lived in the US for years, and have been separated from US citizen family members.
Their legal advocates say that homeland security and the justice department are pivoting away from a longstanding tradition of limiting arrests in immigration courts that could discourage people from appearing at their hearings.
“These directives forsake any notion of immigration courts as a neutral forum, weaponizing them into a trap for immigrants who show up in reliance on the American promise of a fair process before a judge, only to be met instead with handcuffs and shunted into a fast-track deportation process controlled by Ice agents,” said Jordan Wells, senior staff attorney at LCCRSF.
The case was filed in US district court in the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs ask the judge to declare Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and immigration court guidance “arbitrary and capricious” and vacate those guidelines.
