By WENDY FRY, MOHAMED AL ELEW and SERGIO OLMOS
The Trump administration is backing off a push to rapidly deport three Guatemalan day laborers who were detained 200 miles north of the Mexico border after a federal judge blocked it from fast-tracking their removal.
The administration wanted to deport the men under a new policy that it adapted from one that previously was used nearly exclusively at the border, and only for immigrants who recently arrived in the U.S. Advocates said the case had the potential to signal whether the Trump administration could carry out its promised mass, rapid deportations across California
Judge Dana Sabraw issued a temporary restraining order Friday, prohibiting the government from removing the workers from the Southern District of California after their attorneys argued the agents stopped them without reasonable suspicion, in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. The men were detained by Border Patrol agents in Pomona.
“There’s no dispute that the Fourth Amendment applies to people within the interior of the United States, is there?” Sabraw asked the attorney for the federal government, who argued the court didn’t have jurisdiction over the workers’ claims and who characterized the stops as consensual.
Last Monday, the administration backed down.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Dimbleby said during a court hearing that the men were no longer being processed for rapid removal without a hearing before an immigration judge. She added she was seeking assurances from federal immigration authorities that they would not be placed back in the process called expedited removal.
“No reason was given by the government, but we would guess that the government decided it did not want to produce the arresting Border Patrol agents to testify in court under oath on Thursday to justify the legality of their actions,” said Niels Frenzen, an attorney with the USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic who filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of the workers. Habeas corpus is a constitutional right protecting people from unlawful imprisonment by the government.
The workers have not yet been released from custody, but they will now have a chance to appear before an immigration judge in court, giving them the opportunity to challenge their return to Guatemala and to argue that their due process rights were violated.
This case is similar to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the United Farm Workers about sweeping immigration raids that rattled Kern Countyin January. In response to the ACLU’s claims that those raids violated farmworkers’ constitutional rights, the Department of Homeland Security said in court papers that it would retrain the Border Patrol agents on how to follow the Fourth Amendment, which governs police searches and arrests.
In that case, the judge barred the El Centro Border Patrol from carrying out warrantless immigration sweeps in areas governed by the federal courts’ Eastern District of California, which spans the Central Valley from Redding to Bakersfield. The district does not include Pomona, where Border Patrol agents arrested the day laborers in a raid on a Home Depot parking lot on April 22.
Detained while looking for work
The agents conducted the Home Depot arrests without warrants, court records show. At least nine people total were taken into custody in the parking lot sweep, the records state.
Jesus Domingo Ros, one of the men detained in Pomona, said in an interview that he was standing on a street corner near the Home Depot when agents appeared from all sides, grabbed him, and threw him to the ground, leaving him with bruises on his shoulder and knee.
“I panicked,” he said in Spanish, describing the instant he realized he was in custody of U.S. immigration authorities. “Just with everything you’re seeing on the news right now, I really panicked because we didn’t know what was going to happen.” He spoke to CalMatters last month at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, where he is now being held.
The 38-year-old Guatemalan said he crossed into the United States without federal authorization nearly three years ago and has been working in construction in Pomona ever since. He said he was looking for work when agents surrounded him. “I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never been detained. This is my first experience,” he said.
Before transferring him to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he said the El Centro Border Patrol agents held him and others in freezing cold cells for days while interrogating them about who they might know. The agents hung enlarged mug shots along the walls of their cells, demanding to know the names of the people in the mug shots and whether the workers knew them. “When we said we didn’t know them, they argued with us,” he said.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, agents arrested 10 people that day in Pomona and placed them into removal proceedings. No other agencies were involved, said Michael Scappechio, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Advocates are adamant that more than 20 people were initially taken into custody, based on piecing together the accounts of different witnesses about what happened.
Federal officials defended their actions, saying agents were initially targeting a single individual with an active arrest warrant — a barber who they arrested at gunpoint. During the operation, nine other people were also taken into custody. Some of those detained had prior charges, including child abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, immigration violations, and DUI, said Hilton Beckham, the assistant commissioner for the Border Patrol’s office of public affairs.
