By Gregory B. Hladky
Fairfield County Weekly
June 22, 2011
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has just issued new guidelines recommending against deportation of undocumented immigrants involved in pending civil rights and labor cases, a policy change that apparently stems from a controversial New Haven case.
The new policy memorandum was issued late last week by ICE Director John Morton and warns that it is “against ICE policy to remove individuals in the midst of a legitimate effort to protect their civil rights or civil liberties.”
The guidelines for federal prosecutors and ICE agents also recommend that particular attention should be given to individuals “who may be in a non-frivolous dispute with an employer, landlord or contractor” to avoid deportion while legitimate cases are underway.
Michael Wishnie, a professor at the Yale Law School, says the ICE policy change follows heavy lobbying pressure from national civil rights groups, labor unions and others that was triggered by efforts last year to deport Washington Colala.
Colala is an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador who has two U.S. born children. He was one of 30 people picked up during controversial ICE raids in New Haven in 2007. He and others in that group filed lawsuits claiming federal agents violated their civil rights during the raids.
Last November, Colala was ordered by federal authorities to buy a ticket for Ecuador after his appeal of his deportation order was rejected by a federal court.
Wishnie says the group of Yale Law students representing Colala and the others began a campaign to delay his deportation on the grounds that his civil rights case was still pending and he wouldn’t be able to pursue it from Ecuador.
“We sought to mobilize a wide range of stakeholders in support of a more regular policy that would benefit foreign nationals seeking redress in the courts nationwide,” Wishnie said in an email comment about the change in ICE policy.
According to Wishnie, the June 17 memo from Morton “for the first time codifies this important principle” that immigrants with pending civil rights cases like Colala’s shouldn’t be deported before those cases are decided.
The memo also recommends federal officials not take deportation action against undocumented immigrants who may have been picked up by police as a witness to or victim of a crime such as domestic violence or human trafficking.
A federal immigration program known as “Secure Communities” or S-Comm has come under fire from civil rights organizations and others for resulting the deportation of thousands of undocumented immigrants who have come to the attention of local police, often for minor traffic incidents or infractions.
The program was intended to only deport violent or serious criminals, according to federal officials. But the governors of Massachusetts, New York and Illinois have asked to withdraw their states from the program, and activists in Connecticut are urging Gov. Dannel Malloy to follow suit.
Copyright © 2011, Hartford Advocate
Showing posts with label ICE Raid in New Haven. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ICE Raid in New Haven. Show all posts
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
A Case Involving the Exploitation of Undocumented Workers in New Haven Draws Attention to the State's Restaurants
By Gregory B. Hladky
The Hartford Advocate
February 07, 2011
A family of Ecuadorian immigrants is rescued from what they claim was virtual servitude at a New Haven bakery. The owner of Mexican restaurants in Southbury and Prospect pleads guilty to hiring undocumented workers as cooks. A multimillion-dollar chain of Dunkin’ Donut shops along the shoreline is sold after its founder goes to prison for recruiting illegal foreign employees.
According to labor lawyers and immigrant-rights activists, Connecticut’s restaurant and food service industry routinely hires undocumented immigrant workers to wash dishes, clean floors, cook, bake and wait tables. The jobs often involve low pay, long hours and tough working conditions.
And if these workers complain or ask for more money or decent benefits, they can find themselves booted out the door or threatened with deportation as “illegal aliens,” says Sheila Hayre, a lawyer with the New Haven Legal Assistance Association.
“I am shocked at how common it is, how rampant it is,” Hayre says.
Peter Goselin, a Hartford labor lawyer, agrees. “There’s no question that undocumented immigrants are working in many Connecticut restaurants,” he says. “It’s a pretty common feature of the restaurant business in Connecticut.”
We’re not talking just about low-rent pizza places and hamburger joints. “Most nice restaurants in Connecticut have undocumented workers doing crappy jobs,” Goselin says.
This winter, employees of two upscale New Haven restaurants (Cafe Goodfellas and Downtown at the Taft) staged demonstrations to protest unfair wages. John Lugo, an activist who helped organize the protests, says several of those involved are undocumented workers.
“The employers are claiming they didn’t know they were undocumented workers,” says Goselin, who is representing some of those employees.
Gennaro Iannacone, owner of Goodfellas, declined to comment. The owners of Downtown at the Taft, who are apparently planning to reopen the restaurant under a new name, couldn’t be reached for comment.
“They know from the beginning these workers were undocumented,” says Lugo, who is with the advocacy group Unidad Latina en Accion. “But when you ask for these people’s rights, [the owners] say, ‘They are illegal, I don’t have to pay them.’“
The lack of a consistent and comprehensive federal policy on people who enter the United States without the required visas or work permits has become a seemingly insoluble political nightmare for the White House, Congress, federal, state and local officials. Despite President Barack Obama’s promises to change the course of federal immigration policy, deportations have actually increased since his administration took office two years ago.
A new report by the Pew Hispanic Center estimated the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. last year at 11.2 million, about the same as in 2009. The nonpartisan research group’s study also found that the number of undocumented employees in the American workforce also remained steady at about 8 million despite the recession, high unemployment and state crackdowns.
Connecticut’s illegal-immigration issues are mild compared to states like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. The Pew report estimated Connecticut was home to about 120,000 undocumented immigrants in 2010; but that represents a big increase from the approximately 75,000 illegal immigrants who were believed to be here a decade ago.
Their presence has produced its share of controversy here, from New Haven’s 2007 decision to offer city identification cards to undocumented immigrants to the Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton’s proposals to use state and local police to cooperate with federal agents in rounding up undocumented immigrants. Raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents several years ago sparked angry protests in some cities.
Most of the undocumented immigrants in Connecticut are here for the work, whether it’s in construction or landscaping or any of the other businesses willing to hire them. Experts food service is one area where they find low-wage jobs most available, and where they often find themselves exploited. “The vast majority of them work in the food industry,” says Hayre.
Goselin says their situations cover a broad spectrum, from horrific conditions that may even include sexual abuse, to employers who treat undocumented workers just as they treat American-born employees.
The plight of those six Ecuadorians who were working at Rocco’s Bakery on Ferry Street in New Haven is an example of how bad things can get, according to Hayre.
The bakery’s owner, Antonio DiBenedetto of North Branford, pleaded guilty last month to one count of unlawful employment of aliens and now faces a potential fine of up to $250,000 and up to five years in prison. His lawyer, Hugh F. Keefe, insists that DiBenedetto was only trying to help these immigrants by providing them with work and a place to live.
The Ecuadorians have filed a civil suit accusing DiBenedetto and his two sons of sexual and verbal abuse of the women in the family, of threatening them with deportation if they complained about long hours and unfairly low pay. “They were terrified,” Hayre says. “It was just terrible treatment.”
Hayre says this case is unusual because the immigrants involved decided to seek help from local activists, lawyers and federal officials. “Very, very few ever come forward,” she says, explaining most undocumented immigrants fear that if they make an official complaint about an employer violating state and federal labor laws, they will be deported no matter what happens to the employer.
In the Rocco Bakery case, ICE has granted several members of the Ecuadorian family temporary work permits that will allow them to stay in U.S., at least for now.
Lugo acknowledges that not all restaurants hiring undocumented workers are trying to exploit them. “I know some owners who are pretty decent,” he says.
Treating undocumented immigrants decently won’t protect an employer if the feds decide to make an example of him, says Diane Polan, an immigration lawyer. She represented Andrew Adames, an Oxford resident who was prosecuted in 2009 for hiring illegal workers at his chain of Mexican restaurants. She insists Adames never abused his employees, paid them fairly and treated them well.
Polan believes ICE agents went after Adames to make him “the Connecticut poster boy for the federal government’s ... misguided strategy” for solving the problem of undocumented workers. She says the idea was, “If you go and prosecute restaurants, that will solve the problem.”
“How does that help the problem,” Polan asks, “making my client into a convicted felon?” Adames pleaded guilty, paid ICE $150,000, and was given 150 hours of community service.
People in Connecticut’s restaurant and food service industry insist that hiring undocumented workers just isn’t a big deal in this state. Several of the experts attending a recent Farm-To-Chef Annual Meeting in Old Saybrook last month claimed they’d never encountered illegal workers at restaurants where they’d been employed.
John Turenne, a former chef at Yale University who is now with Sustainable Food Systems, says larger food service institutions and companies won’t employ undocumented workers because of the potential for legal problems. “I think they’re out there in smaller businesses,” he argues. “If there was a crackdown, it’s the little guy who would be in trouble.”
Hayre believes it’s far more widespread. She recalls a time a few years ago when a rumor was spread that ICE agents were planning to raid lots of restaurants in New Haven. Hayre and some friends happened to be going out to dinner that night, and at two of the city’s top restaurants, they were told the kitchens had been shut down. Virtually everyone had fled in fear.
“It really brought home for me how hidden these workers are,” she says, “and how totally dependent we are on them.”
http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/featured-news/a-case-involving-the-exploitation-of-undocumented-workers-in-new-haven-draws-attention-to-the-states-restaurants-058472
The Hartford Advocate
February 07, 2011
A family of Ecuadorian immigrants is rescued from what they claim was virtual servitude at a New Haven bakery. The owner of Mexican restaurants in Southbury and Prospect pleads guilty to hiring undocumented workers as cooks. A multimillion-dollar chain of Dunkin’ Donut shops along the shoreline is sold after its founder goes to prison for recruiting illegal foreign employees.
According to labor lawyers and immigrant-rights activists, Connecticut’s restaurant and food service industry routinely hires undocumented immigrant workers to wash dishes, clean floors, cook, bake and wait tables. The jobs often involve low pay, long hours and tough working conditions.
And if these workers complain or ask for more money or decent benefits, they can find themselves booted out the door or threatened with deportation as “illegal aliens,” says Sheila Hayre, a lawyer with the New Haven Legal Assistance Association.
“I am shocked at how common it is, how rampant it is,” Hayre says.
Peter Goselin, a Hartford labor lawyer, agrees. “There’s no question that undocumented immigrants are working in many Connecticut restaurants,” he says. “It’s a pretty common feature of the restaurant business in Connecticut.”
We’re not talking just about low-rent pizza places and hamburger joints. “Most nice restaurants in Connecticut have undocumented workers doing crappy jobs,” Goselin says.
This winter, employees of two upscale New Haven restaurants (Cafe Goodfellas and Downtown at the Taft) staged demonstrations to protest unfair wages. John Lugo, an activist who helped organize the protests, says several of those involved are undocumented workers.
“The employers are claiming they didn’t know they were undocumented workers,” says Goselin, who is representing some of those employees.
Gennaro Iannacone, owner of Goodfellas, declined to comment. The owners of Downtown at the Taft, who are apparently planning to reopen the restaurant under a new name, couldn’t be reached for comment.
“They know from the beginning these workers were undocumented,” says Lugo, who is with the advocacy group Unidad Latina en Accion. “But when you ask for these people’s rights, [the owners] say, ‘They are illegal, I don’t have to pay them.’“
The lack of a consistent and comprehensive federal policy on people who enter the United States without the required visas or work permits has become a seemingly insoluble political nightmare for the White House, Congress, federal, state and local officials. Despite President Barack Obama’s promises to change the course of federal immigration policy, deportations have actually increased since his administration took office two years ago.
A new report by the Pew Hispanic Center estimated the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. last year at 11.2 million, about the same as in 2009. The nonpartisan research group’s study also found that the number of undocumented employees in the American workforce also remained steady at about 8 million despite the recession, high unemployment and state crackdowns.
Connecticut’s illegal-immigration issues are mild compared to states like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. The Pew report estimated Connecticut was home to about 120,000 undocumented immigrants in 2010; but that represents a big increase from the approximately 75,000 illegal immigrants who were believed to be here a decade ago.
Their presence has produced its share of controversy here, from New Haven’s 2007 decision to offer city identification cards to undocumented immigrants to the Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton’s proposals to use state and local police to cooperate with federal agents in rounding up undocumented immigrants. Raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents several years ago sparked angry protests in some cities.
Most of the undocumented immigrants in Connecticut are here for the work, whether it’s in construction or landscaping or any of the other businesses willing to hire them. Experts food service is one area where they find low-wage jobs most available, and where they often find themselves exploited. “The vast majority of them work in the food industry,” says Hayre.
Goselin says their situations cover a broad spectrum, from horrific conditions that may even include sexual abuse, to employers who treat undocumented workers just as they treat American-born employees.
The plight of those six Ecuadorians who were working at Rocco’s Bakery on Ferry Street in New Haven is an example of how bad things can get, according to Hayre.
The bakery’s owner, Antonio DiBenedetto of North Branford, pleaded guilty last month to one count of unlawful employment of aliens and now faces a potential fine of up to $250,000 and up to five years in prison. His lawyer, Hugh F. Keefe, insists that DiBenedetto was only trying to help these immigrants by providing them with work and a place to live.
The Ecuadorians have filed a civil suit accusing DiBenedetto and his two sons of sexual and verbal abuse of the women in the family, of threatening them with deportation if they complained about long hours and unfairly low pay. “They were terrified,” Hayre says. “It was just terrible treatment.”
Hayre says this case is unusual because the immigrants involved decided to seek help from local activists, lawyers and federal officials. “Very, very few ever come forward,” she says, explaining most undocumented immigrants fear that if they make an official complaint about an employer violating state and federal labor laws, they will be deported no matter what happens to the employer.
In the Rocco Bakery case, ICE has granted several members of the Ecuadorian family temporary work permits that will allow them to stay in U.S., at least for now.
Lugo acknowledges that not all restaurants hiring undocumented workers are trying to exploit them. “I know some owners who are pretty decent,” he says.
Treating undocumented immigrants decently won’t protect an employer if the feds decide to make an example of him, says Diane Polan, an immigration lawyer. She represented Andrew Adames, an Oxford resident who was prosecuted in 2009 for hiring illegal workers at his chain of Mexican restaurants. She insists Adames never abused his employees, paid them fairly and treated them well.
Polan believes ICE agents went after Adames to make him “the Connecticut poster boy for the federal government’s ... misguided strategy” for solving the problem of undocumented workers. She says the idea was, “If you go and prosecute restaurants, that will solve the problem.”
“How does that help the problem,” Polan asks, “making my client into a convicted felon?” Adames pleaded guilty, paid ICE $150,000, and was given 150 hours of community service.
People in Connecticut’s restaurant and food service industry insist that hiring undocumented workers just isn’t a big deal in this state. Several of the experts attending a recent Farm-To-Chef Annual Meeting in Old Saybrook last month claimed they’d never encountered illegal workers at restaurants where they’d been employed.
John Turenne, a former chef at Yale University who is now with Sustainable Food Systems, says larger food service institutions and companies won’t employ undocumented workers because of the potential for legal problems. “I think they’re out there in smaller businesses,” he argues. “If there was a crackdown, it’s the little guy who would be in trouble.”
Hayre believes it’s far more widespread. She recalls a time a few years ago when a rumor was spread that ICE agents were planning to raid lots of restaurants in New Haven. Hayre and some friends happened to be going out to dinner that night, and at two of the city’s top restaurants, they were told the kitchens had been shut down. Virtually everyone had fled in fear.
“It really brought home for me how hidden these workers are,” she says, “and how totally dependent we are on them.”
http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/featured-news/a-case-involving-the-exploitation-of-undocumented-workers-in-new-haven-draws-attention-to-the-states-restaurants-058472
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Frustrated Judge Can't Stop ICE Deportation; A plaintiff suing ICE is deported
By Betsy Yagla
New Haven Advocate
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
A reluctant judge won’t allow an undocumented immigrant to stay in the country to pursue a lawsuit against the immigration agency that’s deporting him.
The 44-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant, Washington Colala, was one of 32 immigrants swept up in a 2007 Fair Haven raid. The raid came on the heels of New Haven’s plan to offer ID cards to all residents, including immigrants.
The raid was seen as the federal government’s retaliation for a liberal city’s “sanctuary policies.”
Those arrested claimed their civil rights were trampled during the raids — Immigrant Customs and Enforcement agents did not identify themselves, forced their way into homes and searched homes without warrants.
Most of those arrested had no criminal history despite ICE’s claims that the agency only focuses on undocumented immigrants who are involved in serious crimes.
Now, as 11 of those 32 immigrants are seeking justice through a civil rights lawsuit against ICE, one of the key witnesses — Colala — is facing deportation. Colala’s attorneys claim it will be nearly impossible for him to participate in the lawsuit from his village in the Amazonian part of Ecuador.
Colala’s case was cited by national civil rights groups LatinoJustice and the National Council of La Raza in letters asking ICE to stop deporting plaintiffs in lawsuits against ICE.
“For us, it is about individuals whose rights need to be heard, who should have their day in court,” says La Raza legislative analyst Laura Vazquez explaining why La Raza is petitioning ICE to change its policy. “And in this country, we believe in the principle of equal justice before the law.”
That lofty goal was not met during an emergency hearing last week in U.S. district judge Stefan Underhill’s Bridgeport courtroom.
Underhill said he didn’t see any legal avenue for him to halt a decision — an immigration judge’s decision to deport Colala — made in another court.
Colala’s attorneys, Yale law students with The Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and supervising attorney Muneer Ahmad, argued that Underhill did have that authority: By keeping Colala in the country, Underhill could ensure a smooth court proceeding in the pending civil rights case.
Underhill asked Ahmad to cite any case in which a judge had done something similar. Ahmad couldn’t but insisted that Underhill had the “inherent authority” to do so.
“It’s surprising to me that I have an inherent authority to do this if there are no other cases like this,” replied Underhill.
That’s because there are so few cases like Colala’s, Ahmad said.
There are five states, including Connecticut, in which ICE is in the process of deporting plaintiffs in lawsuits against ICE, according to the National Council of La Raza.
It is rare that immigrants arrested in raids have lawyers fighting their deportation. It’s even rarer that they’re able to file civil rights lawsuits.
So if Colala — with a team of idealistic lawyers behind him — couldn’t win a deferral of his deportation, it doesn’t bode well for others.
Although Underhill expressed unwillingness to keep Colala in the country long enough to see through his civil rights case, the judge was clearly frustrated by the government.
“As a comment, to the extent that the government is doing this as a tactical maneuver, I think it is a very poor tactical move,” Underhill told the government attorneys.
The government’s attorney, Washington, D.C.-based Senior Litigation Counsel Christopher Dempsey, bristled.
“The United States is not removing Mr. Colala as a tactical matter,” he said. Dempsey argued that if any immigrant facing deportation could file a lawsuit against ICE and be allowed to remain in the country, “the immigration system in this country would come to a halt.”
But ICE can choose when, or if, to deport someone in the country illegally, says Brittney Nystrom, National Immigration Forum’s policy and legal affairs director.
“We would urge the department to at least announce a policy where they are willing to consider allowing individuals to finish their civil rights litigation,” Nystrom says.
“There’s nothing more American than justice for all and having one’s fair day in court,” she says. “We as a nation have built a civil and criminal justice system around that principal and equal protection.”
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/featured-news/frustrated-judge-cant-stop-ice-deportation-037420
New Haven Advocate
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
A reluctant judge won’t allow an undocumented immigrant to stay in the country to pursue a lawsuit against the immigration agency that’s deporting him.
The 44-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant, Washington Colala, was one of 32 immigrants swept up in a 2007 Fair Haven raid. The raid came on the heels of New Haven’s plan to offer ID cards to all residents, including immigrants.
The raid was seen as the federal government’s retaliation for a liberal city’s “sanctuary policies.”
Those arrested claimed their civil rights were trampled during the raids — Immigrant Customs and Enforcement agents did not identify themselves, forced their way into homes and searched homes without warrants.
Most of those arrested had no criminal history despite ICE’s claims that the agency only focuses on undocumented immigrants who are involved in serious crimes.
Now, as 11 of those 32 immigrants are seeking justice through a civil rights lawsuit against ICE, one of the key witnesses — Colala — is facing deportation. Colala’s attorneys claim it will be nearly impossible for him to participate in the lawsuit from his village in the Amazonian part of Ecuador.
Colala’s case was cited by national civil rights groups LatinoJustice and the National Council of La Raza in letters asking ICE to stop deporting plaintiffs in lawsuits against ICE.
“For us, it is about individuals whose rights need to be heard, who should have their day in court,” says La Raza legislative analyst Laura Vazquez explaining why La Raza is petitioning ICE to change its policy. “And in this country, we believe in the principle of equal justice before the law.”
That lofty goal was not met during an emergency hearing last week in U.S. district judge Stefan Underhill’s Bridgeport courtroom.
Underhill said he didn’t see any legal avenue for him to halt a decision — an immigration judge’s decision to deport Colala — made in another court.
Colala’s attorneys, Yale law students with The Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and supervising attorney Muneer Ahmad, argued that Underhill did have that authority: By keeping Colala in the country, Underhill could ensure a smooth court proceeding in the pending civil rights case.
Underhill asked Ahmad to cite any case in which a judge had done something similar. Ahmad couldn’t but insisted that Underhill had the “inherent authority” to do so.
“It’s surprising to me that I have an inherent authority to do this if there are no other cases like this,” replied Underhill.
That’s because there are so few cases like Colala’s, Ahmad said.
There are five states, including Connecticut, in which ICE is in the process of deporting plaintiffs in lawsuits against ICE, according to the National Council of La Raza.
It is rare that immigrants arrested in raids have lawyers fighting their deportation. It’s even rarer that they’re able to file civil rights lawsuits.
So if Colala — with a team of idealistic lawyers behind him — couldn’t win a deferral of his deportation, it doesn’t bode well for others.
Although Underhill expressed unwillingness to keep Colala in the country long enough to see through his civil rights case, the judge was clearly frustrated by the government.
“As a comment, to the extent that the government is doing this as a tactical maneuver, I think it is a very poor tactical move,” Underhill told the government attorneys.
The government’s attorney, Washington, D.C.-based Senior Litigation Counsel Christopher Dempsey, bristled.
“The United States is not removing Mr. Colala as a tactical matter,” he said. Dempsey argued that if any immigrant facing deportation could file a lawsuit against ICE and be allowed to remain in the country, “the immigration system in this country would come to a halt.”
But ICE can choose when, or if, to deport someone in the country illegally, says Brittney Nystrom, National Immigration Forum’s policy and legal affairs director.
“We would urge the department to at least announce a policy where they are willing to consider allowing individuals to finish their civil rights litigation,” Nystrom says.
“There’s nothing more American than justice for all and having one’s fair day in court,” she says. “We as a nation have built a civil and criminal justice system around that principal and equal protection.”
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/featured-news/frustrated-judge-cant-stop-ice-deportation-037420
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
ICE Tries to Deport Immigrants Suing the Agency
Federal judge intervenes
By Betsy Yagla
New Have Advocate
December 08, 2010 12:00pm
Despite a lawsuit claiming immigration agents violated his constitutional rights when they drew their weapons, barged into his home and handcuffed him before identifying themselves, Washington Colala was set to be deported earlier this week.
A federal judge intervened at the 11th hour. Now Colala and his attorneys have one week to convince the judge why Colala should be allowed to stay in the country long enough to see through his civil rights lawsuit.
“This is a very meaningful decision for [Colala], because it allows him to fight for his own rights and the rights of others in similar situations,” says Mark Pedulla, one of Colala’s student attorneys at Yale’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization.
It was early morning on June 6, 2007, and Colala was on his way to work. He realized he’d forgotten something and returned to his Fair Haven home.
That’s when he was approached by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents who asked for identification. It was inside, he told them. With guns drawn, the agents told him to let them inside.
“I obeyed and did what they told me to do,” he said in a recent interview, using a Yale student attorney as an interpreter. Inside, he handed over his ID and was promptly handcuffed. He estimates it was about half an hour after he was handcuffed that the agents identified themselves.
Colala called the arrest “humiliating.”
Colala is one of 32 swept up in a series of raids in 2007 that came days after New Haven aldermen approved a program to provide IDs to city residents regardless of immigration status. The raids were widely seen as retaliation for the program.
After the raid, ICE began deportation proceedings against the immigrants. With the help of Yale student attorneys, the immigrants continue to fight their deportations, raising legal claims of constitutional violations. (Some won their cases and ICE is appealing; others lost and are appealing.) Colala had a different attorney who raised different legal issues to fight his deportation. He lost the case and then lost on appeal too.
In November, ICE told Colala to buy a plane ticket and leave the country by Dec. 6.
The rush to deport him is raising eyebrows, because Colala is a key witness in a civil rights lawsuit filed by himself and 10 others alleging ICE violated their constitutional rights by not identifying themselves, by forcing their way into their homes and searching them without warrants.
The same lawsuit alleges ICE officials knew the agency had a pattern of conducting “warrantless home invasions, racial profiling, coercive questioning, arresting individuals without probable cause, detaining individuals without reasonable suspicion, and denying detainees access to counsel and telephones.”
“We are so puzzled by why ICE is trying to expedite this [deportation],” Yale Law student Rebecca Scholtz said just days before Colala was scheduled to leave the country. “It gives the impression that ICE is trying to avoid liability.”
An ICE spokesman did not return a call for comment.
Clearly, it’s to ICE’s advantage to deport Colala and people like him who’ve filed lawsuits against the agency, says Muneer Ahmad, a Yale Law professor and the supervisory attorney for the immigrants’ case.
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The Yale student attorneys will argue in front of Judge Stefan Underhill this week about why Colala should be allowed to stay through the duration of his lawsuit.
Colala isn’t the only immigrant in this situation.
Two national advocacy groups, the National Council of La Raza and Latino Justice, recently wrote letters to ICE director John Morton, demanding a change in policy.
Immigrants with valid civil rights claims pending against ICE are being deported from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida and California, the letters state.
“ICE’s policy of removing individuals whose rights have been violated — before they have had their day in court — also violates the fundamental principle of equal justice before the law, and has no place in a nation committed to democracy,” reads the letter from Latino Justice.
Both groups are asking that ICE adopt a policy to allow immigrants with civil rights complaints to remain in the country until their trial is completed.
From Ecuador it will be virtually impossible for Colala to participate in his lawsuit. The spotty telecommunications in the Pastaza province mean he won’t be able to speak frequently with his attorneys to assist in the case. He’ll also never get the chance to tell his story to a federal judge.
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/featured-news/ice-tries-to-deport-immigrants-suing-the-agency-037357
By Betsy Yagla
New Have Advocate
December 08, 2010 12:00pm
Despite a lawsuit claiming immigration agents violated his constitutional rights when they drew their weapons, barged into his home and handcuffed him before identifying themselves, Washington Colala was set to be deported earlier this week.
A federal judge intervened at the 11th hour. Now Colala and his attorneys have one week to convince the judge why Colala should be allowed to stay in the country long enough to see through his civil rights lawsuit.
“This is a very meaningful decision for [Colala], because it allows him to fight for his own rights and the rights of others in similar situations,” says Mark Pedulla, one of Colala’s student attorneys at Yale’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization.
It was early morning on June 6, 2007, and Colala was on his way to work. He realized he’d forgotten something and returned to his Fair Haven home.
That’s when he was approached by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents who asked for identification. It was inside, he told them. With guns drawn, the agents told him to let them inside.
“I obeyed and did what they told me to do,” he said in a recent interview, using a Yale student attorney as an interpreter. Inside, he handed over his ID and was promptly handcuffed. He estimates it was about half an hour after he was handcuffed that the agents identified themselves.
Colala called the arrest “humiliating.”
Colala is one of 32 swept up in a series of raids in 2007 that came days after New Haven aldermen approved a program to provide IDs to city residents regardless of immigration status. The raids were widely seen as retaliation for the program.
After the raid, ICE began deportation proceedings against the immigrants. With the help of Yale student attorneys, the immigrants continue to fight their deportations, raising legal claims of constitutional violations. (Some won their cases and ICE is appealing; others lost and are appealing.) Colala had a different attorney who raised different legal issues to fight his deportation. He lost the case and then lost on appeal too.
In November, ICE told Colala to buy a plane ticket and leave the country by Dec. 6.
The rush to deport him is raising eyebrows, because Colala is a key witness in a civil rights lawsuit filed by himself and 10 others alleging ICE violated their constitutional rights by not identifying themselves, by forcing their way into their homes and searching them without warrants.
The same lawsuit alleges ICE officials knew the agency had a pattern of conducting “warrantless home invasions, racial profiling, coercive questioning, arresting individuals without probable cause, detaining individuals without reasonable suspicion, and denying detainees access to counsel and telephones.”
“We are so puzzled by why ICE is trying to expedite this [deportation],” Yale Law student Rebecca Scholtz said just days before Colala was scheduled to leave the country. “It gives the impression that ICE is trying to avoid liability.”
An ICE spokesman did not return a call for comment.
Clearly, it’s to ICE’s advantage to deport Colala and people like him who’ve filed lawsuits against the agency, says Muneer Ahmad, a Yale Law professor and the supervisory attorney for the immigrants’ case.
Similar Articles
* Hearing Postponed in New Haven 30 Case
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* Free, Free At Last?
The Yale student attorneys will argue in front of Judge Stefan Underhill this week about why Colala should be allowed to stay through the duration of his lawsuit.
Colala isn’t the only immigrant in this situation.
Two national advocacy groups, the National Council of La Raza and Latino Justice, recently wrote letters to ICE director John Morton, demanding a change in policy.
Immigrants with valid civil rights claims pending against ICE are being deported from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida and California, the letters state.
“ICE’s policy of removing individuals whose rights have been violated — before they have had their day in court — also violates the fundamental principle of equal justice before the law, and has no place in a nation committed to democracy,” reads the letter from Latino Justice.
Both groups are asking that ICE adopt a policy to allow immigrants with civil rights complaints to remain in the country until their trial is completed.
From Ecuador it will be virtually impossible for Colala to participate in his lawsuit. The spotty telecommunications in the Pastaza province mean he won’t be able to speak frequently with his attorneys to assist in the case. He’ll also never get the chance to tell his story to a federal judge.
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/featured-news/ice-tries-to-deport-immigrants-suing-the-agency-037357
Friday, December 3, 2010
Judge Delays Deportation
By Betsy Yagla
New Haven Advocate
Friday, December 03, 2010
Colala and more than 30 immigrants were arrested in the raids and ICE began deportation proceedings against them. Some of the 30 have left voluntarily, others legal removal cases are still pending in immigration court.
Colala’s appeals have been exhausted.
He is one of many undocumented immigrants across the country fighting to stay here until they are able to complete their civil rights cases against the immigration agency.
After a conference call today between Colala’s Yale student lawyers and Judge Underhill, Underhill ruled to stay—or delay—Colala’s deportation for one week.
Underhill has scheduled a hearing for Thursday, Dec. 9 to decide whether Colala will be allowed to remain in the country to see through his civil rights lawsuit.
Colala is the father of four children, two of whom were born in the U.S. He’s been in the country for 15 years, working in the construction field. He says his children and wife depend on him “100 percent” and supporting them economically will be difficult in Ecuador.
Another thing that will be difficult, or virtually impossible, from Ecuador: Participating in his lawsuit against ICE.
Colala says that on the morning of June 6, 2007 he was outside his home when he was approached by immigration officials. They asked for his ID and he said it was inside. Then, guns drawn, they told Colala to let them into his house. Colala obeyed, showed them his ID and then was handcuffed.
He says it was about half an hour after he was handcuffed that the agents identified themselves.
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/drive-by-media/judge-delays-deportation-035643
New Haven Advocate
Friday, December 03, 2010
Washington Colala’s deportation has been put on hold for a week, thanks to U.S. district court judge Stefan Underhill.
Colala was scheduled to be deported on Monday Dec. 6 to Ecuador—he’d even bought his plane ticket—despite the fact that Colala has a pending civil rights lawsuit against Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), the agency moving to deport him.
"This is a very meaningful decision for [Colala] because it allows him to fight for his own rights and the rights of others in similar situations," said Mark Pedulla, one of Colala's Yale Law student attorneys.
Colala is "delighted," says Pedulla.
Colala is one of 11 plaintiffs suing ICE, claiming their civil rights were violated in a June 2007 raid in Fair Haven. The raid came two days after New Haven aldermen voted to approve the city’s ID card program available to all residents regardless of their immigration status.
Colala and more than 30 immigrants were arrested in the raids and ICE began deportation proceedings against them. Some of the 30 have left voluntarily, others legal removal cases are still pending in immigration court.
Colala’s appeals have been exhausted.
He is one of many undocumented immigrants across the country fighting to stay here until they are able to complete their civil rights cases against the immigration agency.
After a conference call today between Colala’s Yale student lawyers and Judge Underhill, Underhill ruled to stay—or delay—Colala’s deportation for one week.
Underhill has scheduled a hearing for Thursday, Dec. 9 to decide whether Colala will be allowed to remain in the country to see through his civil rights lawsuit.
Colala is the father of four children, two of whom were born in the U.S. He’s been in the country for 15 years, working in the construction field. He says his children and wife depend on him “100 percent” and supporting them economically will be difficult in Ecuador.
Another thing that will be difficult, or virtually impossible, from Ecuador: Participating in his lawsuit against ICE.
Colala says that on the morning of June 6, 2007 he was outside his home when he was approached by immigration officials. They asked for his ID and he said it was inside. Then, guns drawn, they told Colala to let them into his house. Colala obeyed, showed them his ID and then was handcuffed.
He says it was about half an hour after he was handcuffed that the agents identified themselves.
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/drive-by-media/judge-delays-deportation-035643
ICE to deport one from the 2007 Fair Haven raids
By Betsy Yagla
New Haven Advocate
December 01, 2010
One of the “New Haven 30” who were swept up in the controversial 2007 Fair Haven immigration raids is facing imminent deportation.
ICE (Immigration, Custom and Enforcement) is attempting to deport Washington Colala by Monday, Dec. 6. He’s already bought his plane ticket.
That’s a problem, says Yale Law student Mark Padulla, because Colala is one of 11 plaintiffs who’ve filed suit against ICE claiming that the feds violated their civil rights in the raids.
“They’re trying to rush him while his claims are still pending,” says Padulla. In addition to his own claims, Colala was a witness for his roommate. And a federal judge deemed Colala’s witness testimony to be credible; the judge dismissed the immigration charges against Colala’s roommate.
Colala has no criminal history, but does have two U.S.-born children, including a 10-year-old daughter who lives in the area.
Colala is from Ecuador and has been working in the U.S. for 15 years. He’s been fighting his deportation in immigration court. He lost the case and appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. On Tuesday, the second circuit denied his appeal.
The raids happened the day after New Haven aldermen voted to move forward with the city’s innovative residency card, an ID program available to all city residents regardless of citizenship status. It’s widely believed that the immigration raids happened in direct response to the program.
Local immigrant rights groups have been fighting on behalf of the men and as part of a records request found emails between the federal Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s office (located next to City Hall) showing that the USAO wanted to send a message to New Haven.
For its part, ICE has said that the raids were pre-planned and had nothing to do with the ID card program.
Of the 30 picked up in the raids, 11 have filed a civil rights case against ICE, claiming, for instance, that agents did not identify themselves and forced their way into homes in the wee hours of the morning on June 7, 2007.
Colala is the only one of the 11 facing deportation. The other 10 raised constitutional issues in their immigration cases and five won because a judge concluded that ICE agents committed Fourth Amendment violations during the raids. The remaining five lost and are appealing those decisions.
If Colala is deported on Monday he will not be able to participate in the civil rights case. He is a key witness in the case.
Colala is one of several people found on the street, and presumably because of his skin tone and lack of English skills, was assumed to be an undocumented immigrant. According to court papers, here’s his version of what happened that June 2007 day:
Colala left his home to walk to work but returned home to pick up something. At his building, officers approached him and asked if he lived there. They also asked for his ID. His ID was inside, he said. Then he was handcuffed and forced inside and upstairs to his apartment. At the apartment’s landing, officers drew guns and demanded he open the locked door. Without a search warrant or consent, officers entered the apartment.
According to a 2007 interview with the Advocate, one of Colala’s roommates was in the shower when ICE agents entered the home. He was handcuffed when he exited the shower and found Colala handcuffed and sitting on the living room floor.
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/drive-by-media/ice-to-deport-one-from-the-2007-fair-haven-raids-035619
New Haven Advocate
December 01, 2010
One of the “New Haven 30” who were swept up in the controversial 2007 Fair Haven immigration raids is facing imminent deportation.
ICE (Immigration, Custom and Enforcement) is attempting to deport Washington Colala by Monday, Dec. 6. He’s already bought his plane ticket.
That’s a problem, says Yale Law student Mark Padulla, because Colala is one of 11 plaintiffs who’ve filed suit against ICE claiming that the feds violated their civil rights in the raids.
“They’re trying to rush him while his claims are still pending,” says Padulla. In addition to his own claims, Colala was a witness for his roommate. And a federal judge deemed Colala’s witness testimony to be credible; the judge dismissed the immigration charges against Colala’s roommate.
Colala has no criminal history, but does have two U.S.-born children, including a 10-year-old daughter who lives in the area.
Colala is from Ecuador and has been working in the U.S. for 15 years. He’s been fighting his deportation in immigration court. He lost the case and appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. On Tuesday, the second circuit denied his appeal.
The raids happened the day after New Haven aldermen voted to move forward with the city’s innovative residency card, an ID program available to all city residents regardless of citizenship status. It’s widely believed that the immigration raids happened in direct response to the program.
Local immigrant rights groups have been fighting on behalf of the men and as part of a records request found emails between the federal Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s office (located next to City Hall) showing that the USAO wanted to send a message to New Haven.
For its part, ICE has said that the raids were pre-planned and had nothing to do with the ID card program.
Of the 30 picked up in the raids, 11 have filed a civil rights case against ICE, claiming, for instance, that agents did not identify themselves and forced their way into homes in the wee hours of the morning on June 7, 2007.
Colala is the only one of the 11 facing deportation. The other 10 raised constitutional issues in their immigration cases and five won because a judge concluded that ICE agents committed Fourth Amendment violations during the raids. The remaining five lost and are appealing those decisions.
If Colala is deported on Monday he will not be able to participate in the civil rights case. He is a key witness in the case.
Colala is one of several people found on the street, and presumably because of his skin tone and lack of English skills, was assumed to be an undocumented immigrant. According to court papers, here’s his version of what happened that June 2007 day:
Colala left his home to walk to work but returned home to pick up something. At his building, officers approached him and asked if he lived there. They also asked for his ID. His ID was inside, he said. Then he was handcuffed and forced inside and upstairs to his apartment. At the apartment’s landing, officers drew guns and demanded he open the locked door. Without a search warrant or consent, officers entered the apartment.
According to a 2007 interview with the Advocate, one of Colala’s roommates was in the shower when ICE agents entered the home. He was handcuffed when he exited the shower and found Colala handcuffed and sitting on the living room floor.
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/drive-by-media/ice-to-deport-one-from-the-2007-fair-haven-raids-035619
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Putting Heat On ICE
Immigrants use civil lawsuits to protest raids by federal agents
Connecticut Law Tribune
By CHRISTIAN NOLAN
Monday, November 16, 2009
Copyright 2009, ALM Properties, Inc.
In May 2006, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency launched “Operation Return To Sender.” The goal: track down, arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, particularly felons, gang members and other dangerous types.
Since then, ICE agents have conducted scores of raids on homes and workplaces. Advocacy groups and lawyers say some agents have been overly zealous, and the advocates have regularly gone to court to try to void arrests and block deportations. But in what seems to be a small, but significant trend, some have also gone on the offensive, filing civil lawsuits against ICE and its agents.
The most recent example is in Connecticut, where a Yale School of Law legal clinic has filed suit on behalf of 10 undocumented immigrants whose homes were raided in June 2007. Immigration attorneys differ on whether the claim has much chance of success. But most agree that litigation is an interesting strategy that could buy time in America for the clients and give ICE officials reason to reconsider tactics.
Attorney Alex Meyerovich, of Bridgeport’s M.C. Law Group, called the lawsuit part of a “cat and mouse game” between federal agents and advocates for immigrants. Similar claims have been filed following sweeps on immigrant homes in New Jersey, New York, Georgia and Northern California in recent years.
“What Yale is trying to do is to intimidate ICE,” said Meyerovich. “To show there is a potential liability if they step over an invisible border. It doesn’t matter if [the lawsuit] succeeds or fails. It’s an important power struggle.”
Meyerovich has few kind words for ICE agents, calling some of them “vigilantes.” But he also would not endorse the civil rights lawsuit. “If illegal immigrants succeed in this lawsuit, the message might come out, if you come into the country illegally and get arrested, your rights were violated. I think it’s the wrong message.”
ID Card Controversy
In the spring of 2007, New Haven officials decided to make ID cards available to all residents, including illegal immigrants. They said the cards would bring the newcomers into the mainstream by giving them a means to open bank accounts and access other services. The decision stirred up a furor. Some national commentators lamented that New Haven was turning into a safe haven for illegal immigrants.
Just days after the first cards were issued, ICE agents entered homes and arrested 29 immigrants. There was rampant speculation that the sweeps were in response to the new policy. But ICE officials maintained they were simply carrying out their mission and were not punishing New Haven.
Nevertheless, a team of students at Yale’s Immigration Clinic, which is part of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, went to federal immigration court in Hartford to request full hearings for the detainees. Not only were they granted hearings, but they eventually persuaded the judge to temporarily halt deportation proceedings for a number of the immigrants. An immigration judge this summer ruled that the government “egregiously violated” the Fourth Amendment rights of the immigrants by entering homes forcibly without warrants.
Then last month the Yale students filed their lawsuit against 18 ICE agents and the United States. Citing e-mail messages between federal officials obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, the plaintiffs attempt to show hostility to the ID card program and intent to stop it. The lawsuit cites a conference call between ICE officials and prosecutors in which they discussed the “headaches in New Haven.”
One e-mail from an ICE attorney stated: “Yale is loading up the Amistad with illegal immigrants and sailing them to freedom, while [ICE counsel] openly weeps in Hartford.” The reference was to the 18th century slave ship commandeered by African captives who eventually won their freedom.
The lawsuit alleges ICE agents broke into homes without search warrants or consent, arrested residents based on their race or ethnicity, and violated the immigrants’ Fourth, Fifth and 10th Amendment rights. The suit seeks declaratory relief and monetary compensation for the immigrants.
“The people who planned the raids had a retaliatory motive,” said Ana Muñoz, a third-year law student working on the case. “People in D.C. knew their raid teams were violating the Constitution left and right and still agreed to approve this particular raid.”
Tom Carson, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Connecticut, said the office would likely defend the lawsuit and that it had no comment. But Jeffrey Meyer, a former assistant U.S. attorney who now teaches at Quinnipiac University School of Law, said the government will almost certainly use sovereign immunity as a defense, and the agents will use qualified immunity. Federal agents are generally exempt from civil liability for on-the-job actions.
However, the Yale clinic filed its suit under the Federal Torts Claim Act, which allows plaintiffs to collect damages if federal officials commit a tort in violation of state law. The plaintiffs must do more than prove that the agents made mistakes or used poor discretion, Meyer said. The plaintiffs must prove that the agents knowingly violated “a clearly established legal rule.”
He provided this example: An agent with a warrant going into the wrong home could likely successfully assert immunity. But an agent kicking in the door of a residence with no warrant at all could be the violation of a clearly established legal rule.
Meyer predicted that while ICE would have a hard time getting the lawsuit dismissed, the immigrants would have to clear a “high hurdle” to win in court. “The outcome is going to depend on a fact-intensive review of whether these officers were acting reasonably in conducting these raids,” said Meyer. “They’re entitled to seek to detain persons who are here illegally in the country. The question is, how do they go about doing that?”
'Raw Force’
The hurdles Meyer mentioned have not stopped suits from being filed.
In 2007, nearly two dozen plaintiffs filed a class action against ICE after sweeps in New York City and on Long Island. The complaint alleges that ICE agents entered homes with submachine guns and shotguns, in one instance, pointing a gun at a man’s chest before searching his home without a warrant.
In April 2008, the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall University Law School filed a lawsuit on behalf of 10 New Jersey plaintiffs who contend that ICE agents used “deceit or, in some cases, raw force” to gain “unlawful entry.” The lawsuit claims that agents, sometimes misrepresenting themselves as police officers hunting for criminals, entered homes and detained residents without showing any legal cause.
In Atlanta in 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit claiming ICE agents harassed five U.S. citizens of Mexican descent because of their appearance during sweeps targeting illegal immigrants in southern Georgia. The lawsuit also claimed agents unlawfully searched homes and detained people merely because they looked Mexican.
Mary Bauer, legal affairs director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that such lawsuits became something of a trend in the years after ICE launched Operation Return To Sender. “I’m not sure people would do these cases for the money,” Bauer said. “Our clients did it for the principle. The point of this lawsuit was to change public policy, and to ask, ‘Is this what we want our government to do in the name of strict enforcement?’”
Bauer said the Georgia plaintiffs settled their lawsuit this summer and were awarded monetary damages.
Nevertheless, Connecticut attorneys say the New Haven immigrants face an uphill legal battle. For instance, they say that because immigration law is civil and not criminal, ICE agents have wider latitude in conducting searches than do police.
“From my perspective, I think it’s going to be a very tough case to win,” said Douglas R. Penn, of Stamford’s Barr & LaCava, who chairs the Connecticut chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Still, Penn believes the case is worthwhile. “I think it’s good to try to establish some set of standards” for ICE.
Another immigration attorney broached the touchy topic of whether illegal immigrants even have constitutional protections. “I don’t think they have much of a leg to stand on,” said Daniel Marcus, of Globman and Marcus P.C. in Hartford. “If I were a federal court judge, I’d say these people were here illegally and we don’t see how [ICE] infringed on their constitutional rights in anyway.”
Marcus called the lawsuit “a scholarly exercise that will wind up being futile.” He added: “Yale is doing whatever it can to keep these people here. That’s the basis of this. They’re trying to prolong their stays.”
But a lawyer with the Hartford immigration firm of Leete, Kosto & Wizner said she plans to keep close tabs on the case. “This is well-crafted, well-researched and certainly not frivolous,” said Virginia Carstens. This “is relatively unusual, particularly for immigration practitioners who are so focused on individual clients in removal proceedings. Most don’t venture into the Federal Tort Claims Act and some of the real constitutional claims raised here.”
http://www.ctlawtribune.com/getarticle.aspx?ID=35524
Connecticut Law Tribune
By CHRISTIAN NOLAN
Monday, November 16, 2009
Copyright 2009, ALM Properties, Inc.
In May 2006, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency launched “Operation Return To Sender.” The goal: track down, arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, particularly felons, gang members and other dangerous types.
Since then, ICE agents have conducted scores of raids on homes and workplaces. Advocacy groups and lawyers say some agents have been overly zealous, and the advocates have regularly gone to court to try to void arrests and block deportations. But in what seems to be a small, but significant trend, some have also gone on the offensive, filing civil lawsuits against ICE and its agents.
The most recent example is in Connecticut, where a Yale School of Law legal clinic has filed suit on behalf of 10 undocumented immigrants whose homes were raided in June 2007. Immigration attorneys differ on whether the claim has much chance of success. But most agree that litigation is an interesting strategy that could buy time in America for the clients and give ICE officials reason to reconsider tactics.
Attorney Alex Meyerovich, of Bridgeport’s M.C. Law Group, called the lawsuit part of a “cat and mouse game” between federal agents and advocates for immigrants. Similar claims have been filed following sweeps on immigrant homes in New Jersey, New York, Georgia and Northern California in recent years.
“What Yale is trying to do is to intimidate ICE,” said Meyerovich. “To show there is a potential liability if they step over an invisible border. It doesn’t matter if [the lawsuit] succeeds or fails. It’s an important power struggle.”
Meyerovich has few kind words for ICE agents, calling some of them “vigilantes.” But he also would not endorse the civil rights lawsuit. “If illegal immigrants succeed in this lawsuit, the message might come out, if you come into the country illegally and get arrested, your rights were violated. I think it’s the wrong message.”
ID Card Controversy
In the spring of 2007, New Haven officials decided to make ID cards available to all residents, including illegal immigrants. They said the cards would bring the newcomers into the mainstream by giving them a means to open bank accounts and access other services. The decision stirred up a furor. Some national commentators lamented that New Haven was turning into a safe haven for illegal immigrants.
Just days after the first cards were issued, ICE agents entered homes and arrested 29 immigrants. There was rampant speculation that the sweeps were in response to the new policy. But ICE officials maintained they were simply carrying out their mission and were not punishing New Haven.
Nevertheless, a team of students at Yale’s Immigration Clinic, which is part of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, went to federal immigration court in Hartford to request full hearings for the detainees. Not only were they granted hearings, but they eventually persuaded the judge to temporarily halt deportation proceedings for a number of the immigrants. An immigration judge this summer ruled that the government “egregiously violated” the Fourth Amendment rights of the immigrants by entering homes forcibly without warrants.
Then last month the Yale students filed their lawsuit against 18 ICE agents and the United States. Citing e-mail messages between federal officials obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, the plaintiffs attempt to show hostility to the ID card program and intent to stop it. The lawsuit cites a conference call between ICE officials and prosecutors in which they discussed the “headaches in New Haven.”
One e-mail from an ICE attorney stated: “Yale is loading up the Amistad with illegal immigrants and sailing them to freedom, while [ICE counsel] openly weeps in Hartford.” The reference was to the 18th century slave ship commandeered by African captives who eventually won their freedom.
The lawsuit alleges ICE agents broke into homes without search warrants or consent, arrested residents based on their race or ethnicity, and violated the immigrants’ Fourth, Fifth and 10th Amendment rights. The suit seeks declaratory relief and monetary compensation for the immigrants.
“The people who planned the raids had a retaliatory motive,” said Ana Muñoz, a third-year law student working on the case. “People in D.C. knew their raid teams were violating the Constitution left and right and still agreed to approve this particular raid.”
Tom Carson, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Connecticut, said the office would likely defend the lawsuit and that it had no comment. But Jeffrey Meyer, a former assistant U.S. attorney who now teaches at Quinnipiac University School of Law, said the government will almost certainly use sovereign immunity as a defense, and the agents will use qualified immunity. Federal agents are generally exempt from civil liability for on-the-job actions.
However, the Yale clinic filed its suit under the Federal Torts Claim Act, which allows plaintiffs to collect damages if federal officials commit a tort in violation of state law. The plaintiffs must do more than prove that the agents made mistakes or used poor discretion, Meyer said. The plaintiffs must prove that the agents knowingly violated “a clearly established legal rule.”
He provided this example: An agent with a warrant going into the wrong home could likely successfully assert immunity. But an agent kicking in the door of a residence with no warrant at all could be the violation of a clearly established legal rule.
Meyer predicted that while ICE would have a hard time getting the lawsuit dismissed, the immigrants would have to clear a “high hurdle” to win in court. “The outcome is going to depend on a fact-intensive review of whether these officers were acting reasonably in conducting these raids,” said Meyer. “They’re entitled to seek to detain persons who are here illegally in the country. The question is, how do they go about doing that?”
'Raw Force’
The hurdles Meyer mentioned have not stopped suits from being filed.
In 2007, nearly two dozen plaintiffs filed a class action against ICE after sweeps in New York City and on Long Island. The complaint alleges that ICE agents entered homes with submachine guns and shotguns, in one instance, pointing a gun at a man’s chest before searching his home without a warrant.
In April 2008, the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall University Law School filed a lawsuit on behalf of 10 New Jersey plaintiffs who contend that ICE agents used “deceit or, in some cases, raw force” to gain “unlawful entry.” The lawsuit claims that agents, sometimes misrepresenting themselves as police officers hunting for criminals, entered homes and detained residents without showing any legal cause.
In Atlanta in 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit claiming ICE agents harassed five U.S. citizens of Mexican descent because of their appearance during sweeps targeting illegal immigrants in southern Georgia. The lawsuit also claimed agents unlawfully searched homes and detained people merely because they looked Mexican.
Mary Bauer, legal affairs director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that such lawsuits became something of a trend in the years after ICE launched Operation Return To Sender. “I’m not sure people would do these cases for the money,” Bauer said. “Our clients did it for the principle. The point of this lawsuit was to change public policy, and to ask, ‘Is this what we want our government to do in the name of strict enforcement?’”
Bauer said the Georgia plaintiffs settled their lawsuit this summer and were awarded monetary damages.
Nevertheless, Connecticut attorneys say the New Haven immigrants face an uphill legal battle. For instance, they say that because immigration law is civil and not criminal, ICE agents have wider latitude in conducting searches than do police.
“From my perspective, I think it’s going to be a very tough case to win,” said Douglas R. Penn, of Stamford’s Barr & LaCava, who chairs the Connecticut chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Still, Penn believes the case is worthwhile. “I think it’s good to try to establish some set of standards” for ICE.
Another immigration attorney broached the touchy topic of whether illegal immigrants even have constitutional protections. “I don’t think they have much of a leg to stand on,” said Daniel Marcus, of Globman and Marcus P.C. in Hartford. “If I were a federal court judge, I’d say these people were here illegally and we don’t see how [ICE] infringed on their constitutional rights in anyway.”
Marcus called the lawsuit “a scholarly exercise that will wind up being futile.” He added: “Yale is doing whatever it can to keep these people here. That’s the basis of this. They’re trying to prolong their stays.”
But a lawyer with the Hartford immigration firm of Leete, Kosto & Wizner said she plans to keep close tabs on the case. “This is well-crafted, well-researched and certainly not frivolous,” said Virginia Carstens. This “is relatively unusual, particularly for immigration practitioners who are so focused on individual clients in removal proceedings. Most don’t venture into the Federal Tort Claims Act and some of the real constitutional claims raised here.”
http://www.ctlawtribune.com/getarticle.aspx?ID=35524
Saturday, October 31, 2009
IMMIGRATION RAIDS: Arrestees Claim Rights Were Violated During New Haven Immigration Raids
By HILDA MUÑOZ
The Hartford Courant
October 29, 2009
Ten city residents arrested during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the summer of 2007 are suing the agency in federal court, claiming their civil rights were violated.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in New Haven, naming the agents who conducted the raids, their supervisors and senior ICE officials as defendants.
The plaintiffs, who are fighting deportation, are being represented by lawyers and students from Yale Law School's Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization.
"For them, it's been a humiliating, fear-producing, difficult and extraordinarily painful situation," said Ana Muñoz, one of the law students working on the case.
ICE does not comment on pending litigation, agency spokeswoman Paula Grenier said.
The plaintiffs were sleeping or engaged in morning routines the morning of June 6, 2007, when ICE agents, carrying a "target list," banged on their doors. Weapons drawn, agents entered the plaintiffs' homes without cause, consent or search warrants, according to the lawsuit.
"Federal immigration authorities had not previously determined that most of those they arrested were in violation of immigration law, and the agents who stormed through Fair Haven had no reason to assume that those they arrested lacked immigration status," the lawsuit states.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said that ICE agents often are looking for a fugitive immigrant and end up finding an undocumented immigrant.
"Every illegal alien is deportable," he said. " You don't have legal right to complain that ICE found you."
The Center for Immigration Studies is a nonprofit organization devoted to research and policy analysis of the impact of immigration in the United States.
Federal agents arrested 29 illegal immigrants in the raids, two days after city officials approved a program that would grant identification cards to undocumented immigrants.
At the time, Grenier said the roundup was part of a routine fugitive operation, according to a report by the Associated Press. But city officials, including Mayor John DeStefano, said they believed the raids were conducted in retaliation for the Elm City Resident Card Program.
The lawsuit makes the same claim.
"Hartford ICE agents deliberately chose to conduct raids in New Haven in retaliation for the City's efforts to improve public safety for all its residents by integrating immigrants and Latinos into civic life," the lawsuit states.
"When federal law enforcement officials try to fulfill enforcement obligations, the Constitution still applies to them," Muñoz said.
http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-icelawsuit1029.artoct29,0,313028.story
The Hartford Courant
October 29, 2009
Ten city residents arrested during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the summer of 2007 are suing the agency in federal court, claiming their civil rights were violated.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in New Haven, naming the agents who conducted the raids, their supervisors and senior ICE officials as defendants.
The plaintiffs, who are fighting deportation, are being represented by lawyers and students from Yale Law School's Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization.
"For them, it's been a humiliating, fear-producing, difficult and extraordinarily painful situation," said Ana Muñoz, one of the law students working on the case.
ICE does not comment on pending litigation, agency spokeswoman Paula Grenier said.
The plaintiffs were sleeping or engaged in morning routines the morning of June 6, 2007, when ICE agents, carrying a "target list," banged on their doors. Weapons drawn, agents entered the plaintiffs' homes without cause, consent or search warrants, according to the lawsuit.
"Federal immigration authorities had not previously determined that most of those they arrested were in violation of immigration law, and the agents who stormed through Fair Haven had no reason to assume that those they arrested lacked immigration status," the lawsuit states.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said that ICE agents often are looking for a fugitive immigrant and end up finding an undocumented immigrant.
"Every illegal alien is deportable," he said. " You don't have legal right to complain that ICE found you."
The Center for Immigration Studies is a nonprofit organization devoted to research and policy analysis of the impact of immigration in the United States.
Federal agents arrested 29 illegal immigrants in the raids, two days after city officials approved a program that would grant identification cards to undocumented immigrants.
At the time, Grenier said the roundup was part of a routine fugitive operation, according to a report by the Associated Press. But city officials, including Mayor John DeStefano, said they believed the raids were conducted in retaliation for the Elm City Resident Card Program.
The lawsuit makes the same claim.
"Hartford ICE agents deliberately chose to conduct raids in New Haven in retaliation for the City's efforts to improve public safety for all its residents by integrating immigrants and Latinos into civic life," the lawsuit states.
"When federal law enforcement officials try to fulfill enforcement obligations, the Constitution still applies to them," Muñoz said.
http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-icelawsuit1029.artoct29,0,313028.story
Friday, October 2, 2009
Immigrants sue feds over 2007 raids
By Esther Zuckerman and Colin Ross
Yale Daily News
Published: Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Ten New Haven residents intend to file a lawsuit today against federal immigration agents and officials, accusing them of violating constitutional rights during the raids in New Haven on June 6, 2007.
The 10 residents, who will be represented by Yale Law School students, claim that the raids were unconstitutional because federal agents lacked search warrants and arrested people solely on the basis of race and ethnicity. The residents are expected to sue not only the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who participated in the raid on the ground but also their supervisors, whose decisions the plaintiffs say led to the infringements of civil rights.
This is the first time lawyers have challenged the constitutionality of the New Haven raids in the federal judicial branch. Previous lawsuits have been filed in federal immigration court, the entity within the executive branch that deals with deportation.
The Yale lawyers say the raids were mounted in retaliation of the Board of Aldermen’s approval two days earlier of the Elm City Resident Card, an ID card provided to residents regardless of immigration status. ICE officials have said the raids were routine enforcement in full accordance with the law.
On June 6, 2007, ICE agents raided eight apartments and homes, detaining 29 New Haven residents — five of whom were the intended targets of the raids.
“ICE agents broke into my home without permission while I was still sleeping, pulled the covers from my bed, and arrested me for no reason,” said Jose Solano-Yangua, a plaintiff in the case, in a press release. “I was terrified and humiliated. We are bringing this suit, because we refuse to let our families and community live in fear.”
Since 2007, a team of lawyers and students led by Law School professor Michael Wishnie ’87 LAW ’93 has been working to prove that the individual arrests were
illegal. They have argued that the searches and seizures violated the immigrants’
Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, which protect against unreasonable searches and seizures and guarantee due process of law.
One of the detainees has been deported, five volunteered to leave, and 17 cases are still pending.
Until now, the lawyers have been litigating the individual cases. This new lawsuit seeks to hold individual ICE officials accountable for the alleged constitutional violations.
In a press release, Lindsay Nash LAW ’10, one of the Yale law students representing the plaintiffs, blamed senior ICE officials for the raids because they pressured regional ICE offices to make “arrest quotas.”
In 2006, the director of ICE’s Detention and Removal Office, John Torres, increased the agency’s goal for immigration arrests to 1,000 per regional enforcement team, up from 125, according to internal ICE memos obtained by the Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law through a Freedom of Information request.
That same year, Torres permitted arrests of immigrants without criminal records or fugitive status to count toward ICE’s goal, according to the ICE documents.
In February, ICE spokesman Richard Rocha told the News that the goal increase was in accordance with the agency’s mission.
“The number of arrests is a goal, not a quota, and we do prioritize,” he said at the time. “But if, in the course of our work, we encounter other illegal individuals, we have to enforce the law.”
Norma Franceschi, a Fair Haven proprietor and community leader, praised the suit for providing the federal court an opportunity to reform immigration law.
Father James Manship of St. Rose of Lima Church said that the neighborhood supports the plaintiffs in the case.
“Our community will not be intimidated or silenced,” Manship said in the press release. “We will stand with the plaintiffs in this lawsuit in order to seek justice.”
Ana Munoz LAW ’10, one of the Yale law students working on the lawsuit, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
New Haven is home to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 undocumented immigrants, most of whom live in Fair Haven.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/city-news/2009/10/28/immigrants-sue-feds-over-2007-raid/
Yale Daily News
Published: Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Ten New Haven residents intend to file a lawsuit today against federal immigration agents and officials, accusing them of violating constitutional rights during the raids in New Haven on June 6, 2007.
The 10 residents, who will be represented by Yale Law School students, claim that the raids were unconstitutional because federal agents lacked search warrants and arrested people solely on the basis of race and ethnicity. The residents are expected to sue not only the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who participated in the raid on the ground but also their supervisors, whose decisions the plaintiffs say led to the infringements of civil rights.
This is the first time lawyers have challenged the constitutionality of the New Haven raids in the federal judicial branch. Previous lawsuits have been filed in federal immigration court, the entity within the executive branch that deals with deportation.
The Yale lawyers say the raids were mounted in retaliation of the Board of Aldermen’s approval two days earlier of the Elm City Resident Card, an ID card provided to residents regardless of immigration status. ICE officials have said the raids were routine enforcement in full accordance with the law.
On June 6, 2007, ICE agents raided eight apartments and homes, detaining 29 New Haven residents — five of whom were the intended targets of the raids.
“ICE agents broke into my home without permission while I was still sleeping, pulled the covers from my bed, and arrested me for no reason,” said Jose Solano-Yangua, a plaintiff in the case, in a press release. “I was terrified and humiliated. We are bringing this suit, because we refuse to let our families and community live in fear.”
Since 2007, a team of lawyers and students led by Law School professor Michael Wishnie ’87 LAW ’93 has been working to prove that the individual arrests were
illegal. They have argued that the searches and seizures violated the immigrants’
Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, which protect against unreasonable searches and seizures and guarantee due process of law.
One of the detainees has been deported, five volunteered to leave, and 17 cases are still pending.
Until now, the lawyers have been litigating the individual cases. This new lawsuit seeks to hold individual ICE officials accountable for the alleged constitutional violations.
In a press release, Lindsay Nash LAW ’10, one of the Yale law students representing the plaintiffs, blamed senior ICE officials for the raids because they pressured regional ICE offices to make “arrest quotas.”
In 2006, the director of ICE’s Detention and Removal Office, John Torres, increased the agency’s goal for immigration arrests to 1,000 per regional enforcement team, up from 125, according to internal ICE memos obtained by the Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law through a Freedom of Information request.
That same year, Torres permitted arrests of immigrants without criminal records or fugitive status to count toward ICE’s goal, according to the ICE documents.
In February, ICE spokesman Richard Rocha told the News that the goal increase was in accordance with the agency’s mission.
“The number of arrests is a goal, not a quota, and we do prioritize,” he said at the time. “But if, in the course of our work, we encounter other illegal individuals, we have to enforce the law.”
Norma Franceschi, a Fair Haven proprietor and community leader, praised the suit for providing the federal court an opportunity to reform immigration law.
Father James Manship of St. Rose of Lima Church said that the neighborhood supports the plaintiffs in the case.
“Our community will not be intimidated or silenced,” Manship said in the press release. “We will stand with the plaintiffs in this lawsuit in order to seek justice.”
Ana Munoz LAW ’10, one of the Yale law students working on the lawsuit, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
New Haven is home to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 undocumented immigrants, most of whom live in Fair Haven.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/city-news/2009/10/28/immigrants-sue-feds-over-2007-raid/
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Part 2 of 2: The unmaking of a haven
By Isaac Arnsdorf
Staff Reporter
Yale Daily News
September 29, 2009
When Teresa Gonzalez Vala was put in the unmarked white van outside her house on Atwater Street early on the morning of June 6, 2007, there were already four men and two women inside. They sat on two benches facing each other between the barred, tinted windows. She thought they would be deported right away.
Cirilo Sedeño Trujillo, too, thought they would be going straight back to Mexico. But he was not as scared, or at least he did not want to appear to be; he had been arrested once before, and he felt prepared for whatever was coming. Plus, he knew something the immigration officers did not, which was that Teresa’s boyfriend, Amilcar Soto Velazquez, had hidden his cell phone in his pocket before he was handcuffed.
When there were nine people inside, the ignition started smoothly and the van started to move, fast, with Teresa angling to see where they were going through the windshield, which was also the only light source. One right and two lefts later, the van stopped in front of a house on Peck Street.
Inside, on the second floor, a 34-year-old man was sleeping with his wife and children in the same room when they were awakened by a knock. He went into the living room half-dressed and asked, “Who is it?” in Spanish (his English being meager). “Police” was the reply, also in Spanish.
“Who are you looking for?” asked the resident. Someone named Chavez. There was no one named Chavez in the apartment, he answered.
He opened the door three or four inches and saw two policemen. One of them pushed the door open, and the resident stepped back to avoid being hit. The officer came inside and stationed himself in front of the door, outstretching his arms to block anyone from leaving, dropping them only momentarily to allow his fellow officer inside. The resident’s wife and son came running into the living room.
The second officer asked where the front door led. He left, and two more came: a male, armed, and a female. In English, they questioned the resident about his immigration status; his 12-year-old son translated, and the resident gave the officers his documentation. While one of the officers questioned him, another tried to open the door to his cousin’s room, but it was locked. The officer hit the door with his hand and feet, damaging the lock. But the cousin was not inside; he had left for work at 6 a.m. that morning.
The officer went into the bedroom of the resident’s live-in nephew, who was 22 and still in bed with his girlfriend. “Where is Chavez?” an agent yelled at them. The 22-year-old said he did not know anyone named Chavez. The agent ordered him and his girlfriend out of bed, handcuffed them and led them into the living room. His uncle, too, was handcuffed.
Officer Richard McCaffrey, who has worked in immigration enforcement for 15 years, was initially outside the house on Peck Street, then entered the back door and interacted with some of the occupants. At no time, he would later tell a court, did he see any unnecessary force or any officer enter without permission.
“There is another side here,” McCaffrey said in an interview at his office in Hartford. But, he added, the matter is still ongoing, and the litigation is still pending, and as a field officer he is not authorized to speak to the press at all. He said he regretted seeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement get beat up in the press without the agency being able to defend itself, to tell its side of the story.
“I would love to,” he said. “But I can’t.”
***
In all, seven people were arrested on Peck Street, four more of whom came into Teresa Gonzalez Vala’s van, making 13 inside. They were squeezed in, some of them literally sitting on top of each other. Teresa felt fortunate she didn’t have anyone on her lap because the pain in her bladder was intense as it was; she still had not had a chance to relieve herself.
The van left Peck Street, got on Interstate 95 and pulled into the parking lot of a closed tollbooth off exit 42 in West Haven, where a big white bus was waiting. The detainees from all the vans were being transferred to the bus to be taken to Hartford for processing. There was an agent, a man, who spoke Spanish, so Teresa told him, “If you don’t take me to a bathroom, I’m going to pee on the bus.” It was now 9:30 a.m.
The agent took her and another woman to a bathroom near the parking lot. He went into the bathroom with them, and Teresa asked him to take off her handcuffs so she could use the toilet. He refused. So the two women, complete strangers, went into the stall together and took turns: One pulled down the other’s pants, and she used the toilet, but with her hands tied in front of her she wasn’t able to wipe. Then the other pulled her pants back up, and then they switched. When they were finished, the officer didn’t let them wash their hands before bringing them back to the bus.
The men and women had to sit on different sides of the bus, separated by bars. Their handcuffs were removed, replaced instead with metal chains that tied their wrists, waists and legs. Cirilo Sedeño Trujillo, trying to keep up his spirits, joked to himself that the shackles made him walk like a penguin. As the bus took off, the chained passengers leaned with every turn, unable to brace themselves, unable even to scratch their noses.
But Amilcar — he has no idea how — could somehow reach the cell phone he had smuggled aboard, and he called Angelo Reyes and Norma Franceschi, the Fair Haven proprietors and community leaders. “I’m telling you, there are like 20 people here,” Amilcar told him. Norma and Angelo wanted to know who they were. The detainees started passing the phone around, bending over as much to hide the phone as to reach their ear while their hands were bound. Angelo, Norma and Father Jim Manship of St. Rose of Lima Church relayed the names to Community Services Administrator Kica Matos until the phone’s battery ran out.
As people started calling Matos back with information, she wanted to pass it along to Michael Wishnie, a professor at Yale Law School who ran a clinic that works on immigration cases. His secretary told Matos he was out of town, so she left an emergency message. He called her back within an hour, and she told him what had happened and asked him to represent the detainees.
When the bus arrived at the garage beneath the Department of Removal Operations office in Hartford, the detainees were taken into the elevator and up to the top floor to be photographed and fingerprinted. Their hands were released from the chains but their legs remained tied.
One of the agents, a Puerto Rican, gave Amilcar a form to sign, but he couldn’t read it in English. The ICE agent spoke Spanish, but would not translate the form, instead insisting that Amilcar sign it. If he didn’t, the agent said he would do it for him and Amilcar would spend a long time in jail. Amilcar refused to sign what he could not read.
At 10 p.m., he was transferred to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, a private center outside Providence, R.I. Cirilo and Luis went with him. The detainees were scattered across three other jails throughout New England: Suffolk County Jail in Boston, Cumberland County Jail in Maine and Franklin County Jail in Greenfield, Mass.
But first, some of the women spent the night in Hartford. There was no bed in the cold holding cell where Teresa and three other women were held, so they slept in the fetal position on the cement floor. There was a toilet, but no privacy from either the other women or the male guard walking by on patrol until another guard, a woman, brought them a sheet that they could hold up to block the view. Sitting on the floor and crying, the four cell-mates, though formerly strangers, hugged each other, as much for comfort as for warmth. Teresa thought she would be there for a long time.
***
Word of the raid broke in the local press in the late morning of June 6. By noon it was crawling across the news ticker in Times Square.
“This was a symbolic act of law enforcement by an agency that is not able to control its mission or how it executes its responsibilities. This was an act of intimidation,” Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said through clenched teeth, his face lighted by flashbulbs and the patchy afternoon sun poking through the shady canopy of Wooster Square Park at 4 p.m. In the heart of the city’s historic Italian-American neighborhood, he stood before a podium saddled with six microphones, flanked by community, religious and political, saying the immigration agents had “terrorized” Fair Haven.
While Matos was organizing the city’s response in the field, DeStefano was calling the New Haven police and Connecticut’s congressional delegation, asking them to help him get through to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He wanted to know what the federal agents were doing and why they were doing it, and he wanted it to stop.
***
By evening on June 6, Wishnie’s team of law students had compiled a working list of the 29 detainees, whose friends and relatives met with the lawyers at Father Manship’s church to confirm the identities of the detainees and to describe the raids.
The lawyers drew up bond motions for all the detainees, but they could not file them without an alien registration number, which they could not get without contacting the detainees. So they could not contact them without the number, and they could not get the number until they contacted them. It was a catch-22.
***
The morning after, on June 7, the guards brought Teresa Gonzalez Vala a ham sandwich, an apple and a small carton of milk. Teresa had been so anxious that she had forgotten to feel hunger; only now, as she wolfed down her breakfast, did she realize it was the first thing she had eaten in at least 30 hours. She didn’t know exactly what time it was because the cell had no window.
Then she was chained up again, taken down to the garage and put in a van. She didn’t know where she was going until she started noticing all the Massachusetts plates on the other cars and saw a big road sign for Boston.
At the Suffolk County Jail, medical examiners administered a blood test, gave Teresa a TB shot and took a urine sample. The results showed that she had developed a urinary infection, she thinks from holding it in and not being able to wipe the day before. They prescribed an antibiotic, but Teresa could not pick up the prescription without an ID, which she didn’t have. Until the lawyers intervened and got her the medicine three or four days later, she felt a burn whenever she had to urinate.
The law students repeatedly tried to request the alien registration numbers from ICE but were denied or ignored. So the students began calling every prison in New England in search of the detainees, until one law student phoned Wyatt, where several of them were being held, and the guard, unaware that ICE had been withholding the alien numbers, provided them.
Once all the detainees were transferred to prisons, they were able to call their families, who passed on their whereabouts to people at Junta, who passed it along to the lawyers. It took two to five days to locate the detainees, days when friends and families had no idea where they were being held or if they had already been deported. It was a full week before the last detainee had been identified.
***
Within the first week, four of the detainees posted bond, which was set at $15,000 for the 26 without criminal records and $25,000 for the three with criminal backgrounds. Most of the money was raised by extended families, and many employers also chipped in. John Lugo went door-to-door in Fair Haven asking for donations. One family brought $25,000 in small bills and coins to Father Manship, who counted it out in front of them, took it to the bank to get a cashier’s check and then drove to Hartford to post the bail.
After 10 days, Norma Franceschi drove to Hartford with Teresa’s bail money. She got to the office at 10 a.m. and waited until 4 p.m., when she was told that Teresa would be freed from the jail in Boston in one hour.
“I can’t get there in one hour,” Norma protested, knowing Boston was 100 miles away.
“Well, if you don’t pick her up, she will be homeless,” Norma was told.
Teresa was released but told if she loitered outside the jails she would be rearrested, so she started walking around the block, scared of running into officers and scared of the bleak neighborhood she was lost in.
Finally, strangers came in an old red minivan to pick up her and another woman. There had been another family in the Hartford office that was also going to the Suffolk jail, so Norma had asked if they would also pick up Teresa.
She got back to Atwater Street at 11 p.m. The other four who had been arrested were still in jail. But the rest of her family was there. They hugged and cried. But these were different tears than those Teresa had shed in jail. She thanked God she was home.
***
When DeStefano spoke to Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, a few days after the raid, he wanted assurance that any more raids planned for New Haven would be called off. Chertoff told the mayor he couldn’t declare New Haven, or anywhere else, an enforcement-free zone. DeStefano countered that the New Haven police are happy to help enforce the law where warrants are presented, but, the mayor said, that’s not what happened June 6.
But in a June 14 letter to Connecticut’s congressional representatives, Chertoff said ICE’s policy is not to conduct raids or enforce the law ad hoc. Rather, he said, the agency targets specific fugitives in specific locations. Although only five of the 29 arrested on June 6 were the targets of the raids, he said the others were arrested at the targeted locations.
Asking for identifying information or for a form of identification does not violate constitutional protections on search and seizure, he added, although detaining someone for further questioning requires “reasonable suspicion” that the person has committed a crime or is an illegal alien.
The ICE agents never entered a home without consent, Chertoff wrote. To ensure that the residents understood, he said each team included a Spanish-speaking officer. All the residents were brought into a common area for the officers’ safety, he said, which is standard law-enforcement procedure. Family members were provided the address and telephone number of the local ICE office to inquire about those arrested. The officers asked if there were any medical conditions, childcare issues or other humanitarian concerns, and they did not arrest children or leave any children alone without a parent or caregiver. In one instance, Chertoff said, officers stayed with an 11-year-old left home alone until the parents returned.
***
In August 2007, one of the detainees, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, was deported, leaving his wife and two children in the United States. Five others opted for voluntary deportation, which lets them apply to re-enter after three years instead of 10; they left over the spring and summer of 2008. Twelve of the 29 cases are closed. Seventeen moved ahead with motions to suppress; the government won 11 of them, and the Yale Law School clinic is appealing. On the other six, the judge in Hartford, Michael Straus, shifted the burden of proof to the government to justify the arrests.
In January 2009, Straus called on the ICE agents who conducted the raid to testify. They have so far refused to appear in court. Their names have been redacted from all documents released to the public through Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Junta and Wishnie’s clinic at the Yale Law School.
This reporter’s calls to the Hartford ICE office were redirected to a press officer in Boston named Paula Grenier. Starting in April, she did not respond to a dozen attempts to request interviews, by e-mail and by voice messages on her office and cell phones. In late May, she replied, “ICE does not comment on matters pending before a court.” At that time, 17 of the 29 cases were still pending; requests for interviews about the other 12 cases that were not pending were ignored another 10 times. In July, her supervisor, Michael W. Gilhooly, repeated: “ICE does not comment on matters pending before a court.” An appeal to the press office in Washington was referred back to Grenier.
In June, Judge Straus ruled on four more of the detainees, saying their Fourth Amendment rights were “flagrantly” violated when agents entered their homes “without a warrant, probable cause, or consent.” The agents’ conduct, he wrote, was “unreasonable” and “unlawful.” He also impugned the ICE agents for refusing to testify and said the court could not give much weight to the officers’ scant affidavits, which left out relevant information and denied the opportunity for cross-examination. “This due process requires,” he wrote.
Two cases are still awaiting a decision, and the government is appealing the four most recent rulings in the immigrants’ favor. But at the same time the government has moved to close out the era of immigration enforcement that was marked by raids such as the one in New Haven. It is a dramatic shift, in policy and practice, from the tactics on display June 6, 2007.
The new model was demonstrated this past July with Los Angeles-based clothier American Apparel, which apparently employs some 1,800 illegal immigrants. But no agents stormed the factories or pulled people out of bed; instead, ICE sent the company a written notice that it could be fined and must fire undocumented workers.
***
But the damage from the old approach cannot be undone.
In the 10 days she was imprisoned, Teresa Gonzalez Vala lost both of her jobs, and it was a month before she could find another, mostly because she was afraid to leave the house. She had trouble sleeping and tried to distract herself by watching TV but couldn’t really concentrate even on that. She stayed inside for 10 days, and the first time she ventured outside to look for a job, she saw a white van and ran back home.
For more than a month while Teresa was in jail or out of work, she had no money to send back to her teenage daughter and ailing parents in Mexico. Without her support, her father couldn’t afford his diabetes medication. He died a month later, in August 2007.
***
The following October, Junta hosted a support group for 16 children who had been affected by the raids four months earlier. Sandra Trevino, Junta’s director and a social worker who specializes in children’s mental health, led the session. Eleven of the children had witnessed the raids, and the parents of two more had been arrested.
As Trevino evaluated them, she observed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They had nightmares of knocks on the door, were afraid to sleep because they thought their parents wouldn’t be there in the morning, or were afraid to go to school because they thought their parents wouldn’t be there to pick them up at night. They lost sleep and lost their appetites.
At the workshop, the children participated in an art class, making collages of the ocean, using shells and real sand and little paper umbrellas, even though they had never seen a real beach. The session ended at the Yale Polo and Horse Stables, where Trevino took the children horseback riding, which they had never done before. Perhaps there, on the grassy fields of Yale’s sprawling athletic complex, the children could imagine themselves as Ivy League scholar-athletes in white helmets and breeches. Perhaps there, as Trevino hoped, the children could learn how to be gentle, because even a beast as big as a horse scares and recoils when startled by a sudden advance.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/city-news/2009/09/29/part-2-2-unmaking-haven/
Staff Reporter
Yale Daily News
September 29, 2009
When Teresa Gonzalez Vala was put in the unmarked white van outside her house on Atwater Street early on the morning of June 6, 2007, there were already four men and two women inside. They sat on two benches facing each other between the barred, tinted windows. She thought they would be deported right away.
Cirilo Sedeño Trujillo, too, thought they would be going straight back to Mexico. But he was not as scared, or at least he did not want to appear to be; he had been arrested once before, and he felt prepared for whatever was coming. Plus, he knew something the immigration officers did not, which was that Teresa’s boyfriend, Amilcar Soto Velazquez, had hidden his cell phone in his pocket before he was handcuffed.
When there were nine people inside, the ignition started smoothly and the van started to move, fast, with Teresa angling to see where they were going through the windshield, which was also the only light source. One right and two lefts later, the van stopped in front of a house on Peck Street.
Inside, on the second floor, a 34-year-old man was sleeping with his wife and children in the same room when they were awakened by a knock. He went into the living room half-dressed and asked, “Who is it?” in Spanish (his English being meager). “Police” was the reply, also in Spanish.
“Who are you looking for?” asked the resident. Someone named Chavez. There was no one named Chavez in the apartment, he answered.
He opened the door three or four inches and saw two policemen. One of them pushed the door open, and the resident stepped back to avoid being hit. The officer came inside and stationed himself in front of the door, outstretching his arms to block anyone from leaving, dropping them only momentarily to allow his fellow officer inside. The resident’s wife and son came running into the living room.
The second officer asked where the front door led. He left, and two more came: a male, armed, and a female. In English, they questioned the resident about his immigration status; his 12-year-old son translated, and the resident gave the officers his documentation. While one of the officers questioned him, another tried to open the door to his cousin’s room, but it was locked. The officer hit the door with his hand and feet, damaging the lock. But the cousin was not inside; he had left for work at 6 a.m. that morning.
The officer went into the bedroom of the resident’s live-in nephew, who was 22 and still in bed with his girlfriend. “Where is Chavez?” an agent yelled at them. The 22-year-old said he did not know anyone named Chavez. The agent ordered him and his girlfriend out of bed, handcuffed them and led them into the living room. His uncle, too, was handcuffed.
Officer Richard McCaffrey, who has worked in immigration enforcement for 15 years, was initially outside the house on Peck Street, then entered the back door and interacted with some of the occupants. At no time, he would later tell a court, did he see any unnecessary force or any officer enter without permission.
“There is another side here,” McCaffrey said in an interview at his office in Hartford. But, he added, the matter is still ongoing, and the litigation is still pending, and as a field officer he is not authorized to speak to the press at all. He said he regretted seeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement get beat up in the press without the agency being able to defend itself, to tell its side of the story.
“I would love to,” he said. “But I can’t.”
***
In all, seven people were arrested on Peck Street, four more of whom came into Teresa Gonzalez Vala’s van, making 13 inside. They were squeezed in, some of them literally sitting on top of each other. Teresa felt fortunate she didn’t have anyone on her lap because the pain in her bladder was intense as it was; she still had not had a chance to relieve herself.
The van left Peck Street, got on Interstate 95 and pulled into the parking lot of a closed tollbooth off exit 42 in West Haven, where a big white bus was waiting. The detainees from all the vans were being transferred to the bus to be taken to Hartford for processing. There was an agent, a man, who spoke Spanish, so Teresa told him, “If you don’t take me to a bathroom, I’m going to pee on the bus.” It was now 9:30 a.m.
The agent took her and another woman to a bathroom near the parking lot. He went into the bathroom with them, and Teresa asked him to take off her handcuffs so she could use the toilet. He refused. So the two women, complete strangers, went into the stall together and took turns: One pulled down the other’s pants, and she used the toilet, but with her hands tied in front of her she wasn’t able to wipe. Then the other pulled her pants back up, and then they switched. When they were finished, the officer didn’t let them wash their hands before bringing them back to the bus.
The men and women had to sit on different sides of the bus, separated by bars. Their handcuffs were removed, replaced instead with metal chains that tied their wrists, waists and legs. Cirilo Sedeño Trujillo, trying to keep up his spirits, joked to himself that the shackles made him walk like a penguin. As the bus took off, the chained passengers leaned with every turn, unable to brace themselves, unable even to scratch their noses.
But Amilcar — he has no idea how — could somehow reach the cell phone he had smuggled aboard, and he called Angelo Reyes and Norma Franceschi, the Fair Haven proprietors and community leaders. “I’m telling you, there are like 20 people here,” Amilcar told him. Norma and Angelo wanted to know who they were. The detainees started passing the phone around, bending over as much to hide the phone as to reach their ear while their hands were bound. Angelo, Norma and Father Jim Manship of St. Rose of Lima Church relayed the names to Community Services Administrator Kica Matos until the phone’s battery ran out.
As people started calling Matos back with information, she wanted to pass it along to Michael Wishnie, a professor at Yale Law School who ran a clinic that works on immigration cases. His secretary told Matos he was out of town, so she left an emergency message. He called her back within an hour, and she told him what had happened and asked him to represent the detainees.
When the bus arrived at the garage beneath the Department of Removal Operations office in Hartford, the detainees were taken into the elevator and up to the top floor to be photographed and fingerprinted. Their hands were released from the chains but their legs remained tied.
One of the agents, a Puerto Rican, gave Amilcar a form to sign, but he couldn’t read it in English. The ICE agent spoke Spanish, but would not translate the form, instead insisting that Amilcar sign it. If he didn’t, the agent said he would do it for him and Amilcar would spend a long time in jail. Amilcar refused to sign what he could not read.
At 10 p.m., he was transferred to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, a private center outside Providence, R.I. Cirilo and Luis went with him. The detainees were scattered across three other jails throughout New England: Suffolk County Jail in Boston, Cumberland County Jail in Maine and Franklin County Jail in Greenfield, Mass.
But first, some of the women spent the night in Hartford. There was no bed in the cold holding cell where Teresa and three other women were held, so they slept in the fetal position on the cement floor. There was a toilet, but no privacy from either the other women or the male guard walking by on patrol until another guard, a woman, brought them a sheet that they could hold up to block the view. Sitting on the floor and crying, the four cell-mates, though formerly strangers, hugged each other, as much for comfort as for warmth. Teresa thought she would be there for a long time.
***
Word of the raid broke in the local press in the late morning of June 6. By noon it was crawling across the news ticker in Times Square.
“This was a symbolic act of law enforcement by an agency that is not able to control its mission or how it executes its responsibilities. This was an act of intimidation,” Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said through clenched teeth, his face lighted by flashbulbs and the patchy afternoon sun poking through the shady canopy of Wooster Square Park at 4 p.m. In the heart of the city’s historic Italian-American neighborhood, he stood before a podium saddled with six microphones, flanked by community, religious and political, saying the immigration agents had “terrorized” Fair Haven.
While Matos was organizing the city’s response in the field, DeStefano was calling the New Haven police and Connecticut’s congressional delegation, asking them to help him get through to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He wanted to know what the federal agents were doing and why they were doing it, and he wanted it to stop.
***
By evening on June 6, Wishnie’s team of law students had compiled a working list of the 29 detainees, whose friends and relatives met with the lawyers at Father Manship’s church to confirm the identities of the detainees and to describe the raids.
The lawyers drew up bond motions for all the detainees, but they could not file them without an alien registration number, which they could not get without contacting the detainees. So they could not contact them without the number, and they could not get the number until they contacted them. It was a catch-22.
***
The morning after, on June 7, the guards brought Teresa Gonzalez Vala a ham sandwich, an apple and a small carton of milk. Teresa had been so anxious that she had forgotten to feel hunger; only now, as she wolfed down her breakfast, did she realize it was the first thing she had eaten in at least 30 hours. She didn’t know exactly what time it was because the cell had no window.
Then she was chained up again, taken down to the garage and put in a van. She didn’t know where she was going until she started noticing all the Massachusetts plates on the other cars and saw a big road sign for Boston.
At the Suffolk County Jail, medical examiners administered a blood test, gave Teresa a TB shot and took a urine sample. The results showed that she had developed a urinary infection, she thinks from holding it in and not being able to wipe the day before. They prescribed an antibiotic, but Teresa could not pick up the prescription without an ID, which she didn’t have. Until the lawyers intervened and got her the medicine three or four days later, she felt a burn whenever she had to urinate.
The law students repeatedly tried to request the alien registration numbers from ICE but were denied or ignored. So the students began calling every prison in New England in search of the detainees, until one law student phoned Wyatt, where several of them were being held, and the guard, unaware that ICE had been withholding the alien numbers, provided them.
Once all the detainees were transferred to prisons, they were able to call their families, who passed on their whereabouts to people at Junta, who passed it along to the lawyers. It took two to five days to locate the detainees, days when friends and families had no idea where they were being held or if they had already been deported. It was a full week before the last detainee had been identified.
***
Within the first week, four of the detainees posted bond, which was set at $15,000 for the 26 without criminal records and $25,000 for the three with criminal backgrounds. Most of the money was raised by extended families, and many employers also chipped in. John Lugo went door-to-door in Fair Haven asking for donations. One family brought $25,000 in small bills and coins to Father Manship, who counted it out in front of them, took it to the bank to get a cashier’s check and then drove to Hartford to post the bail.
After 10 days, Norma Franceschi drove to Hartford with Teresa’s bail money. She got to the office at 10 a.m. and waited until 4 p.m., when she was told that Teresa would be freed from the jail in Boston in one hour.
“I can’t get there in one hour,” Norma protested, knowing Boston was 100 miles away.
“Well, if you don’t pick her up, she will be homeless,” Norma was told.
Teresa was released but told if she loitered outside the jails she would be rearrested, so she started walking around the block, scared of running into officers and scared of the bleak neighborhood she was lost in.
Finally, strangers came in an old red minivan to pick up her and another woman. There had been another family in the Hartford office that was also going to the Suffolk jail, so Norma had asked if they would also pick up Teresa.
She got back to Atwater Street at 11 p.m. The other four who had been arrested were still in jail. But the rest of her family was there. They hugged and cried. But these were different tears than those Teresa had shed in jail. She thanked God she was home.
***
When DeStefano spoke to Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, a few days after the raid, he wanted assurance that any more raids planned for New Haven would be called off. Chertoff told the mayor he couldn’t declare New Haven, or anywhere else, an enforcement-free zone. DeStefano countered that the New Haven police are happy to help enforce the law where warrants are presented, but, the mayor said, that’s not what happened June 6.
But in a June 14 letter to Connecticut’s congressional representatives, Chertoff said ICE’s policy is not to conduct raids or enforce the law ad hoc. Rather, he said, the agency targets specific fugitives in specific locations. Although only five of the 29 arrested on June 6 were the targets of the raids, he said the others were arrested at the targeted locations.
Asking for identifying information or for a form of identification does not violate constitutional protections on search and seizure, he added, although detaining someone for further questioning requires “reasonable suspicion” that the person has committed a crime or is an illegal alien.
The ICE agents never entered a home without consent, Chertoff wrote. To ensure that the residents understood, he said each team included a Spanish-speaking officer. All the residents were brought into a common area for the officers’ safety, he said, which is standard law-enforcement procedure. Family members were provided the address and telephone number of the local ICE office to inquire about those arrested. The officers asked if there were any medical conditions, childcare issues or other humanitarian concerns, and they did not arrest children or leave any children alone without a parent or caregiver. In one instance, Chertoff said, officers stayed with an 11-year-old left home alone until the parents returned.
***
In August 2007, one of the detainees, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, was deported, leaving his wife and two children in the United States. Five others opted for voluntary deportation, which lets them apply to re-enter after three years instead of 10; they left over the spring and summer of 2008. Twelve of the 29 cases are closed. Seventeen moved ahead with motions to suppress; the government won 11 of them, and the Yale Law School clinic is appealing. On the other six, the judge in Hartford, Michael Straus, shifted the burden of proof to the government to justify the arrests.
In January 2009, Straus called on the ICE agents who conducted the raid to testify. They have so far refused to appear in court. Their names have been redacted from all documents released to the public through Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Junta and Wishnie’s clinic at the Yale Law School.
This reporter’s calls to the Hartford ICE office were redirected to a press officer in Boston named Paula Grenier. Starting in April, she did not respond to a dozen attempts to request interviews, by e-mail and by voice messages on her office and cell phones. In late May, she replied, “ICE does not comment on matters pending before a court.” At that time, 17 of the 29 cases were still pending; requests for interviews about the other 12 cases that were not pending were ignored another 10 times. In July, her supervisor, Michael W. Gilhooly, repeated: “ICE does not comment on matters pending before a court.” An appeal to the press office in Washington was referred back to Grenier.
In June, Judge Straus ruled on four more of the detainees, saying their Fourth Amendment rights were “flagrantly” violated when agents entered their homes “without a warrant, probable cause, or consent.” The agents’ conduct, he wrote, was “unreasonable” and “unlawful.” He also impugned the ICE agents for refusing to testify and said the court could not give much weight to the officers’ scant affidavits, which left out relevant information and denied the opportunity for cross-examination. “This due process requires,” he wrote.
Two cases are still awaiting a decision, and the government is appealing the four most recent rulings in the immigrants’ favor. But at the same time the government has moved to close out the era of immigration enforcement that was marked by raids such as the one in New Haven. It is a dramatic shift, in policy and practice, from the tactics on display June 6, 2007.
The new model was demonstrated this past July with Los Angeles-based clothier American Apparel, which apparently employs some 1,800 illegal immigrants. But no agents stormed the factories or pulled people out of bed; instead, ICE sent the company a written notice that it could be fined and must fire undocumented workers.
***
But the damage from the old approach cannot be undone.
In the 10 days she was imprisoned, Teresa Gonzalez Vala lost both of her jobs, and it was a month before she could find another, mostly because she was afraid to leave the house. She had trouble sleeping and tried to distract herself by watching TV but couldn’t really concentrate even on that. She stayed inside for 10 days, and the first time she ventured outside to look for a job, she saw a white van and ran back home.
For more than a month while Teresa was in jail or out of work, she had no money to send back to her teenage daughter and ailing parents in Mexico. Without her support, her father couldn’t afford his diabetes medication. He died a month later, in August 2007.
***
The following October, Junta hosted a support group for 16 children who had been affected by the raids four months earlier. Sandra Trevino, Junta’s director and a social worker who specializes in children’s mental health, led the session. Eleven of the children had witnessed the raids, and the parents of two more had been arrested.
As Trevino evaluated them, she observed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They had nightmares of knocks on the door, were afraid to sleep because they thought their parents wouldn’t be there in the morning, or were afraid to go to school because they thought their parents wouldn’t be there to pick them up at night. They lost sleep and lost their appetites.
At the workshop, the children participated in an art class, making collages of the ocean, using shells and real sand and little paper umbrellas, even though they had never seen a real beach. The session ended at the Yale Polo and Horse Stables, where Trevino took the children horseback riding, which they had never done before. Perhaps there, on the grassy fields of Yale’s sprawling athletic complex, the children could imagine themselves as Ivy League scholar-athletes in white helmets and breeches. Perhaps there, as Trevino hoped, the children could learn how to be gentle, because even a beast as big as a horse scares and recoils when startled by a sudden advance.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/city-news/2009/09/29/part-2-2-unmaking-haven/
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Part 1 of 2: A safe haven, raided
By Isaac Arnsdorf
Staff Reporter
Yale Daily News
September 28, 2009
The federal agents came at dawn on June 6, 2007, pounding on doors, yelling in an unfamiliar tongue, storming bedrooms, lining up the men on one side of the room and the women on the other. In three hours, they raided eight apartments and homes in New Haven’s predominantly Latino neighborhood of Fair Haven, making 29 arrests. Five of them were the intended targets; the rest were detained along the way.
The detainees found themselves actors in a national drama as their city became the setting of a rare collision of federal and municipal authority in a larger political battle over the fate of more than 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States. That debate is still ongoing, as is the litigation over the raids, which the detainees claim violated their constitutional rights. Last June, a judge sided with four of them, ruling that the agents, who refused to testify in person, “egregiously” violated constitutional protections against search and seizure; other cases are still on appeal.
Refusing to comment on matters pending before a court, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have repeatedly declined to discuss any details related to the raids. Even as the community remains haunted by the events of that Wednesday more than two years ago, exactly what transpired on that morning is still not publicly known. This is the untold story of what happened that day, based on hundreds of pages of affidavits, official reports, e-mails and other documents, and interviews with more than 50 people who were swept up in a clash that shook the city and divided the nation.
***
The people who make the beds and scrub the sinks of hotels are trained to keep out of the guests’ sights and to keep the guests out of theirs. Their work is supposed to be done behind the scenes, so they tread warily of “Do Not Disturb” signs or late sleepers still in the rooms. Their attentions remain fixed on sloppy sheets, strewn garbage, damp towels, stray hairs and empty soap dishes, not on open suitcases or hung garments. Occasionally they cannot help but notice when a guest leaves out something suspicious or sensitive, but they know better than to pay it any mind, which is not to say that they are indifferent to or uninterested in the goings-on in their hotels. Rather, they know that their business is solely cleaning rooms, and their guests’ business is solely their own.
So it must have been all the more exceptional for the housekeepers at a motel outside New Haven to have noticed a group of guests clustering in the parking lot on the early morning of June 6, 2007. The guests had been lodging there for several days, but today they looked different, clad in jackets and caps reading “POLICE” and “ICE.” As their fleet of unmarked white vans and pickup trucks departed, the maids working there, many of them Ecuadorian immigrants, called their husbands and children in New Haven to warn them.
The guests carried folders with pictures and information on 30 illegal immigrants they were targeting — whom they had been spying on for the past week. They drove off into New Haven, watching the city’s handful of finger-like skyscrapers, mostly urban renewal projects, emerging over the sound barriers and trees that lined the highway. They exited the highway through a twisted web of rusty overpasses that emptied onto worn roads, passing dusty lots littered with the vestiges of industrial activity.
The redbrick warehouses were missing windows, and some of those that were not boarded up and empty had found new use as strip clubs. But most of the buildings were modest Federal-style two-family houses, roughly the same as those in the more affluent neighborhoods of New Haven. Except here, in Fair Haven, they showed the wear of a frictional area, a place where cab drivers are loath to go at night, where most of the city’s 22,000 foreign-born residents (10,000 to 15,000 of them undocumented immigrants) make their home. The Italians used to live around this way, as did the Irish once. Now it’s mostly Latinos. Fair Haven, out of all the city’s neighborhoods, stands most apart, not only because it is bounded by the Interstate on one side and by water on the other three, but also because the smell of rotisserie and sounds of salsa could just as easily place it in any Latin American barrio.
It was on one of Fair Haven’s tree-lined streets, Barnes Avenue, that Jose Cortez was leaving his home for work at 5:40 a.m. on June 6, 2007. Usually people would be outside talking casually, but today he noticed something different: two vans, one black, one white, and six other cars with tinted windows.
He called his wife, Guillermina Sanchez, 32. “Come and see because it looks like agents are taking away the next-door neighbors,” he told her. The men certainly looked like agents of some sort. They were dressed in dark green, carrying papers, forcefully pushing eight people into the vans, speaking English to them. Guillermina came to the window in time to see two more men, handcuffed, taken into the vans. As they drove off, she noticed the letters “ICE.”
It was not until 10 a.m., when a friend told her there had been a raid, that Guillermina realized what the initials stood for: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
***
The ICE agents were there in service of their country. It was a country that, despite being founded and built by them, had always been discreetly hostile toward immigrants. But at the turn of the 21st century the matter was no longer merely one of nativism or xenophobia; there were more people immigrating illegally than legally, and there were believed to be 10 million of them nationwide. The issue was electrified by a heightened fear of unknown foreigners and a renewed sense of urgency, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, to secure the nation’s often-porous borders.
So the government moved to enforce its laws, tighten its borders and protect its people; and it tried to do so in a way that involved tracking down and arresting resident aliens like other criminal fugitives, at places of work or, less frequently, in their homes.
The raid in New Haven was part of Operation Return to Sender, a nationwide sweep in 2006 and 2007 in which over 23,000 immigrants were arrested in San Francisco, Miami, Boston and other American cities. According to the operations plan submitted April 20, 2007, the New Haven expedition was originally slated for May 2.
On April 30, one of the ICE agents organizing the New Haven raid e-mailed Connecticut State Police Detective Carmine Verno, asking him to participate, starting with a 5 a.m. meeting on May 2. “if you’re interested we’d love to have you!” the agent wrote. “We have 18 addresses--so it should be a fun time!! Let me know if you guys can play!!”
The raid was delayed until June, at which time Verno and three other state troopers assisted. Those policemen said they could not comment without the approval of the police department’s press office, which did not come. Reached by phone, one of those officers, Detective Richard Van Tine, said simply of what happened on June 6: “We assisted immigration.” He said he could not say more unless he was authorized because the case may be pending and subject to ongoing litigation. When reminded that he was not being sued, he said, “No, and I don’t think anyone should be.”
***
The doorbell rang at the big white house on Fillmore Street at 6:10 a.m. on June 6. It rang again. Kept ringing. Peering through the window, Samuel Sarmiento-Crespo, 44, saw uniformed men in bulletproof vests, and told his wife, Ivana Sotelo, that he thought they should not open the door. But, thinking it was the New Haven police, she said they should since they didn’t know what the emergency was. She pulled on pants and began unlocking the door. As soon as she did, the men pushed through.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked.
“A person from Guatemala,” one of the officers said as seven of them entered the apartment. They climbed the stairs and entered the bedrooms: Ivana and Samuel’s first, and then that of their son, Jerry Sarmiento, who was 14 and a student at Amistad Academy. The agents were searching for something. They told the family to sit down, and Jerry sat next to his mother on the living room sofa.
“Do you have any weapons?” the officers asked, but no one responded. “Do you have any weapons?” they said again, louder.
Seeing the family’s blank stares, one of the officers began to speak in Spanish. The agents had a piece of paper with a photo on the right-hand corner that looked like Ivana, who had been in the United States since 1988. “We need to do some paperwork for you,” one officer told Ivana, who started to cry. “You have to come with us.”
“Can I at least change my shoes first?” she asked. The officer obliged, sending another agent along with Samuel to fetch them. They returned down the stairs with a pair of shoes and socks.
“These are the wrong shoes,” she said.
“It doesn’t match her outfit,” one officer joked, and the rest laughed.
Samuel went to get a different pair, and Ivana put them on. As she stood, the officers handcuffed her and told her she would be deported to Nicaragua.
“Oh my God,” she said as they walked her to the van idling outside.
Her son Jerry watched through the window, crying.
Teresa Gonzalez Vala, 35, had gone to sleep around 11 the night before after coming home from the Mexican restaurant where she worked one of her two jobs. She watched an hour or so of television in her cramped room on the second floor of the beige vinyl house on Atwater Street. Her boyfriend, Amilcar Soto Velasquez, spent the night, as he did once a week or so, with her on the futon mattress that rested on rows of plastic crates. She could not afford a real bed frame or box-spring mattress; she had to pay her share of the $1,000 rent on the house in which 10 people lived (they were all originally from the same pueblo), and Teresa also had to send money back to Mexico to support her elderly parents and 16-year-old daughter.
On June 6, she planned to wake up at 9 a.m. to take a shower and go to work. When Amilcar, 22, stayed over, he usually left at 5 or 5:30 a.m., also to go to work, but today he happened to stay later.
At 6:30 a.m. they awoke to the sound of the front door opening. Teresa thought it might have been one of her housemates returning home from work, but she knew it was a stranger when she heard talking in English. In fact, her housemate Samiy Salazar had just opened the front door, and seven men and a woman pushed through it. Teresa heard them opening the other bedrooms, banging on the doors and shouting, ordering everyone to go into the living room. They entered Luis Sedeño Trujillo’s bedroom, waking him with a start. They pulled Cirilo Sedeño Trujillo, 23, out of bed, too, but gave him a chance to dress.
When the knocking came to Teresa’s door, which was locked, she shouted that she needed a moment to dress, grabbing whichever pants and shirt she found first. She didn’t want to unlock the door, but the constant banging was getting louder, so she opened the door before putting on shoes. The knocking had been coming from a blond woman of medium height, who then rushed into the room, shouting “Move!” The woman grabbed Teresa by the bicep and she and Amilcar staggered out of the bedroom and into the hallway as other officers searched the room.
Teresa thought they must have been police because of their dark green or blue uniforms, but she could not imagine why they would have come. “Why are they doing this when we’ve done nothing wrong?” she thought.
She and the seven other people sleeping in the apartment that morning were all brought to the living room, where Teresa tried to ask the officers who they were and why they were there. An officer guarded the back door so no one could escape. The agents lined up all the men on one side of the room, and the women and children on the other.
One of the officers spoke a little Spanish, but the female agent who had opened Teresa’s door told the residents to be quiet. “Shut up,” the agents barked over the four children’s wails.
One of the women who lived there, Norma Sedeño, 27, was holding her 7-year-old son, Alan, as he cried.
The officers asked for identification, and everyone gave their Mexican IDs — the only kind they had. Teresa said she had left hers in her room, so the female officer followed her to go get it; she also let her put on flip-flops. One man wore only boxers, and the officers permitted him to dress, but another wearing slippers was not allowed to put on shoes. “They are treating us like cattle,” Luis thought.
“Restroom,” Teresa kept saying to the female officer; she needed to use the toilet and that was the only way she knew to say it in English. But the officer wouldn’t let her go. “Restroom,” she repeated.
Teresa was pushed into the kitchen, which was dark except for the daylight peeking through the window. The female officer patted Teresa down, shackled Teresa’s hands in front of her and pushed her past the rickety wooden chairs further into the kitchen so the others could be handcuffed one by one: her boyfriend, Amilcar; Norma’s brothers, Cirilo and Luis; and Norma’s husband, Apolinar Flores.
Besides Teresa, the other women, who said they had young children, were not arrested. Norma’s 7-year-old son Alan, who was sitting next to her on the sofa crying and shaking, saw everything: from his parents getting pulled out of bed to his father getting handcuffed.
As they left, the officers handed Norma a paper on which was written: 450 Main Street, Room 501, Hartford, Connecticut, 06103. It was the address of the immigration court.
***
“They took my husband! They took my cousin!” Norma cried on the phone to Angelo Reyes, a Fair Haven business owner and developer. Children were screaming in the background. Standing in his laundromat on Lombard Street, Angelo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He thought this wasn’t real, wasn’t true, couldn’t be, couldn’t happen, not in New Haven, not in America.
It was not until he knocked on Norma’s door a few minutes later and saw the fear in her eyes that he knew this was real. The children were shaking. He spent an hour there trying to calm her down, meanwhile calling Junta for Progressive Action, a community organization whose headquarters on Grand Avenue was quickly becoming Fair Haven’s crisis center and war room.
***
It was 8 a.m. in City Hall, on Church Street downtown, two miles away. The mayor, John DeStefano Jr., sat in his opulent office facing Kica Matos, the city services administrator, and Emily Byrne, his policy analyst. They were discussing how to convince New Haven banks to accept the Elm City Resident Card, which the city had approved two days earlier.
DeStefano first floated the idea of a city-issued ID — available to any resident regardless of immigration status — in 2005. Undocumented immigrants, lacking any valid form of identification, were unable to participate in simple civic functions such as obtaining a library card or opening a bank account. They were afraid to report crimes they suffered or witnessed because authorities might ask for IDs. New Haven’s card was designed to give them access to libraries, beaches, parks and the dump. All residents were encouraged to get one, and the city would recognize any form of documentation, including those issued by foreign governments. This meant illegal immigrants could obtain a legal government ID card. The Board of Aldermen passed the program, the first of its kind in the nation, on June 4.
The meeting on the morning of June 6 was to work out some of the logistics of the card’s implementation, which was when, as the mayor remembers it, the phone at the front desk started ringing with calls from Fair Haven residents saying there was a raid. At 8 a.m. he called the New Haven Police Department to find out what was going on. (Byrne says she does not remember the specifics of what happened, and the police chief at the time, Francisco Ortiz, declined to say.) As Kica Matos remembers it, a page on the telephone interrupted their meeting. The mayor raised the headset to his ear; then his expression went blank.
“Does this have anything to do with the ID cards?” he said.
Matos turned to Byrne. She had feared but fully expected this to happen for a long time. “I think there’s a raid going on,” she said.
DeStefano hung up, and Matos’ fear was confirmed. The call was from Rob Smuts, the city’s chief administrative officer in charge of fire and police. At 7:15, he had just told the mayor, the NHPD’s non-emergency communications line received a call from ICE to inform them they were conducting a raid, which was already in progress. By 8 a.m., it was just about wrapping up. (Smuts says he could not remember the details of the morning.)
“We need to let the community know,” Matos said. “And we have to find out what’s happening to the detainees.” She said she had to start making calls.
Sure enough, by the time she ran out of the mayor’s office and into her own, her phone was already ringing. It was Norma Franceschi.
Everyone, it seemed, knew Norma Franceschi. She owned a grocery store on Castle Street in Fair Haven, and she was a woman who would give someone she was meeting for the first time a kiss on the cheek. At 6:30 that morning, her husband had gone to pick up Maria de Jesus, who everyone called Marichui, to take her to open up Norma’s store at 7. They were in the car when Marichui received a call from her cousin, Norma Sedeño, who was crying that the police had arrested her husband and cousins. Marichui started crying and called Norma Franceschi, who was still at her home in West Haven. “Norma! Norma!” she said. “Immigration is in New Haven. They took everybody!”
Franceschi had suspected this might happen after a confrontation with counter-protestors at a rally for the New Haven ID cards. Someone had shouted, “There will be consequences!” and she thought something was going to happen. She thought about the time in 1976 when immigration came to arrest her husband because, after immigrating from Argentina in 1971, their visa had expired and there was a lag before the new one was approved. They came early in the morning, when she had been watching TV, and she answered the door holding her two-year-old daughter. She would never forget how the first thing the tall, red-headed officer did was put his foot in the door so she couldn’t close it on him. She called the bakery to warn her husband so he could hide; and she called her attorney, a young Yale Law School graduate named Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67, who helped them get their paperwork in order.
Norma remembered all this and remembered what it felt like to fear Immigration, and then she thought that the first place she should go was St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Fair Haven. She got into her car and called Matos from the road. “Immigration is here,” she cried on the phone, “and they’re taking people away. We don’t know what’s going on. We need help.”
When Norma hung up, Matos’ first outgoing call was to John Lugo, a volunteer community organizer with the immigrant-rights group Unidad Latina en Accion. She told him there had been a raid and he should come over right away. And no, she was not kidding.
Lugo ran out of his house and into his car and tore down the streets toward City Hall as fast as the Toyota Tercel he bought for $500 could go. He had no time to think about how he had always thought it could never happen here, how he had heard about the raids in other cities but thought New Haven was safe, how it had an order that city police should not enforce federal immigration law, or how no one would ever feel safe again, because he was frantically driving with one hand and calling everyone he knew with his cell phone in the other, spreading the word about the raid.
When he arrived after five or 10 minutes, Matos told him all she knew, which was not much so far: just the call to the police and the panic in Fair Haven. She told him to start making calls to figure out what was going on.
“Man, [forget] this,” he interrupted her. “We should be out there. We should confront them.”
“Don’t waste your time,” Matos said. “We need you. You can’t help us from jail.” He started to argue. “You have to sit here!” she pressed him. It was not a suggestion.
He yielded and started dialing, surrounded by the constant shriek of ringing phones. He called community organizations, other volunteers, proprietors, anyone. But after an hour, he knew he couldn’t stay penned up in City Hall any longer. He told Matos he was hitting the streets, and now that he had cooled down a little, she let him go.
Driving toward Fair Haven, Lugo’s phone was still ringing constantly; he used so many minutes that his monthly phone bill, which typically ran about $150, would top $1,000. As he approached Grand Avenue, sweat was beginning to bead below his thick curly hair, even though it was a mild 61 degrees. On a typical day, Grand Avenue is crowded with people, blasting music or socializing beneath Spanish marquees as children play on the sidewalks; it has a street culture redolent of its inhabitants’ native lands. But today it was a ghost town. There was literally no one. Few cars. No people. No noise. Just emptiness.
***
Lucy Negron sat alone in her beauty parlor on Grand Avenue, staring outside at the vacated thoroughfare. She could have sworn she saw ICE vans roaming down the avenue. No one came into her store at all, and her regulars were calling to say they were too scared the leave the house. The weeks-long paralysis, she estimates, cost her parlor between $4,000 and $5,000.
After spending the morning driving around to businesses and houses, responding to distressed calls or alleged Immigration sightings, John Lugo started to get calls from panicked parents. Crying on the phone, mothers told him they couldn’t pick up their children at school because they were afraid of getting arrested if they went outside. So Lugo went around to schools picking up children, who got into his car petrified, convinced by their classmates’ teasing that their parents had been abducted. The staff at one Head Start center in Fair Haven decided that, even though the law required them to, they would not call the police if families were more than two hours late to pick up their children; they feared that children would be separated from undocumented parents. But none of the children’s parents were detained, and all 350 of the children in the center’s care were picked up, if not by their own parents then by friends or community members such as John Lugo.
Angelo Reyes, meanwhile, was making some 20 grocery runs for families who were afraid to go to a store. They told him they would rather have starved.
For Lugo and Angelo, the base of operations was Junta for Progressive Action’s headquarters on Grand Avenue, which since 9 a.m. had been packed with as many as 80 people carrying bags of clothes and wanting to hide or sleep in the basement. The cries of panic were punctuated by the phones ringing with more ICE sightings or distressed households. Junta’s entire staff, as well as 30 representatives from St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Fair Haven, started a phone bank, calling over 800 numbers of families in New Haven, telling them what had happened and what to do, until 11 p.m.
The priest at St. Rose, Father Jim Manship, heard of the raid at 7 that morning, and thought “What is my government doing? These are pot scrubbers and gardeners — not exactly threats to public safety.” Six months prior, when ICE started conducting mass raids at factories, Manship had helped the community plan contingencies should ICE come to a workplace in New Haven. But he never thought they would come knocking on people’s doors, pulling them out of bed.
In the afternoon, John Lugo and others hit the streets on patrol, donning shirts that read “No One is Illegal.” They handed out fliers telling people what to do if ICE came (be quiet and don’t open the door) and gave them a list of numbers to call in an emergency. Junta’s copy machine broke repeatedly throughout the day from running off thousands of copies.
The entire neighborhood descended into a game of telephone. Rumors flew about hundreds of arrests, ICE vans circling like vultures, ICE agents on every corner, barging into restaurants, knocking down doors of houses.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2009/09/28/a-safe-haven-raided/
Staff Reporter
Yale Daily News
September 28, 2009
The federal agents came at dawn on June 6, 2007, pounding on doors, yelling in an unfamiliar tongue, storming bedrooms, lining up the men on one side of the room and the women on the other. In three hours, they raided eight apartments and homes in New Haven’s predominantly Latino neighborhood of Fair Haven, making 29 arrests. Five of them were the intended targets; the rest were detained along the way.
The detainees found themselves actors in a national drama as their city became the setting of a rare collision of federal and municipal authority in a larger political battle over the fate of more than 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States. That debate is still ongoing, as is the litigation over the raids, which the detainees claim violated their constitutional rights. Last June, a judge sided with four of them, ruling that the agents, who refused to testify in person, “egregiously” violated constitutional protections against search and seizure; other cases are still on appeal.
Refusing to comment on matters pending before a court, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have repeatedly declined to discuss any details related to the raids. Even as the community remains haunted by the events of that Wednesday more than two years ago, exactly what transpired on that morning is still not publicly known. This is the untold story of what happened that day, based on hundreds of pages of affidavits, official reports, e-mails and other documents, and interviews with more than 50 people who were swept up in a clash that shook the city and divided the nation.
***
The people who make the beds and scrub the sinks of hotels are trained to keep out of the guests’ sights and to keep the guests out of theirs. Their work is supposed to be done behind the scenes, so they tread warily of “Do Not Disturb” signs or late sleepers still in the rooms. Their attentions remain fixed on sloppy sheets, strewn garbage, damp towels, stray hairs and empty soap dishes, not on open suitcases or hung garments. Occasionally they cannot help but notice when a guest leaves out something suspicious or sensitive, but they know better than to pay it any mind, which is not to say that they are indifferent to or uninterested in the goings-on in their hotels. Rather, they know that their business is solely cleaning rooms, and their guests’ business is solely their own.
So it must have been all the more exceptional for the housekeepers at a motel outside New Haven to have noticed a group of guests clustering in the parking lot on the early morning of June 6, 2007. The guests had been lodging there for several days, but today they looked different, clad in jackets and caps reading “POLICE” and “ICE.” As their fleet of unmarked white vans and pickup trucks departed, the maids working there, many of them Ecuadorian immigrants, called their husbands and children in New Haven to warn them.
The guests carried folders with pictures and information on 30 illegal immigrants they were targeting — whom they had been spying on for the past week. They drove off into New Haven, watching the city’s handful of finger-like skyscrapers, mostly urban renewal projects, emerging over the sound barriers and trees that lined the highway. They exited the highway through a twisted web of rusty overpasses that emptied onto worn roads, passing dusty lots littered with the vestiges of industrial activity.
The redbrick warehouses were missing windows, and some of those that were not boarded up and empty had found new use as strip clubs. But most of the buildings were modest Federal-style two-family houses, roughly the same as those in the more affluent neighborhoods of New Haven. Except here, in Fair Haven, they showed the wear of a frictional area, a place where cab drivers are loath to go at night, where most of the city’s 22,000 foreign-born residents (10,000 to 15,000 of them undocumented immigrants) make their home. The Italians used to live around this way, as did the Irish once. Now it’s mostly Latinos. Fair Haven, out of all the city’s neighborhoods, stands most apart, not only because it is bounded by the Interstate on one side and by water on the other three, but also because the smell of rotisserie and sounds of salsa could just as easily place it in any Latin American barrio.
It was on one of Fair Haven’s tree-lined streets, Barnes Avenue, that Jose Cortez was leaving his home for work at 5:40 a.m. on June 6, 2007. Usually people would be outside talking casually, but today he noticed something different: two vans, one black, one white, and six other cars with tinted windows.
He called his wife, Guillermina Sanchez, 32. “Come and see because it looks like agents are taking away the next-door neighbors,” he told her. The men certainly looked like agents of some sort. They were dressed in dark green, carrying papers, forcefully pushing eight people into the vans, speaking English to them. Guillermina came to the window in time to see two more men, handcuffed, taken into the vans. As they drove off, she noticed the letters “ICE.”
It was not until 10 a.m., when a friend told her there had been a raid, that Guillermina realized what the initials stood for: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
***
The ICE agents were there in service of their country. It was a country that, despite being founded and built by them, had always been discreetly hostile toward immigrants. But at the turn of the 21st century the matter was no longer merely one of nativism or xenophobia; there were more people immigrating illegally than legally, and there were believed to be 10 million of them nationwide. The issue was electrified by a heightened fear of unknown foreigners and a renewed sense of urgency, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, to secure the nation’s often-porous borders.
So the government moved to enforce its laws, tighten its borders and protect its people; and it tried to do so in a way that involved tracking down and arresting resident aliens like other criminal fugitives, at places of work or, less frequently, in their homes.
The raid in New Haven was part of Operation Return to Sender, a nationwide sweep in 2006 and 2007 in which over 23,000 immigrants were arrested in San Francisco, Miami, Boston and other American cities. According to the operations plan submitted April 20, 2007, the New Haven expedition was originally slated for May 2.
On April 30, one of the ICE agents organizing the New Haven raid e-mailed Connecticut State Police Detective Carmine Verno, asking him to participate, starting with a 5 a.m. meeting on May 2. “if you’re interested we’d love to have you!” the agent wrote. “We have 18 addresses--so it should be a fun time!! Let me know if you guys can play!!”
The raid was delayed until June, at which time Verno and three other state troopers assisted. Those policemen said they could not comment without the approval of the police department’s press office, which did not come. Reached by phone, one of those officers, Detective Richard Van Tine, said simply of what happened on June 6: “We assisted immigration.” He said he could not say more unless he was authorized because the case may be pending and subject to ongoing litigation. When reminded that he was not being sued, he said, “No, and I don’t think anyone should be.”
***
The doorbell rang at the big white house on Fillmore Street at 6:10 a.m. on June 6. It rang again. Kept ringing. Peering through the window, Samuel Sarmiento-Crespo, 44, saw uniformed men in bulletproof vests, and told his wife, Ivana Sotelo, that he thought they should not open the door. But, thinking it was the New Haven police, she said they should since they didn’t know what the emergency was. She pulled on pants and began unlocking the door. As soon as she did, the men pushed through.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked.
“A person from Guatemala,” one of the officers said as seven of them entered the apartment. They climbed the stairs and entered the bedrooms: Ivana and Samuel’s first, and then that of their son, Jerry Sarmiento, who was 14 and a student at Amistad Academy. The agents were searching for something. They told the family to sit down, and Jerry sat next to his mother on the living room sofa.
“Do you have any weapons?” the officers asked, but no one responded. “Do you have any weapons?” they said again, louder.
Seeing the family’s blank stares, one of the officers began to speak in Spanish. The agents had a piece of paper with a photo on the right-hand corner that looked like Ivana, who had been in the United States since 1988. “We need to do some paperwork for you,” one officer told Ivana, who started to cry. “You have to come with us.”
“Can I at least change my shoes first?” she asked. The officer obliged, sending another agent along with Samuel to fetch them. They returned down the stairs with a pair of shoes and socks.
“These are the wrong shoes,” she said.
“It doesn’t match her outfit,” one officer joked, and the rest laughed.
Samuel went to get a different pair, and Ivana put them on. As she stood, the officers handcuffed her and told her she would be deported to Nicaragua.
“Oh my God,” she said as they walked her to the van idling outside.
Her son Jerry watched through the window, crying.
Teresa Gonzalez Vala, 35, had gone to sleep around 11 the night before after coming home from the Mexican restaurant where she worked one of her two jobs. She watched an hour or so of television in her cramped room on the second floor of the beige vinyl house on Atwater Street. Her boyfriend, Amilcar Soto Velasquez, spent the night, as he did once a week or so, with her on the futon mattress that rested on rows of plastic crates. She could not afford a real bed frame or box-spring mattress; she had to pay her share of the $1,000 rent on the house in which 10 people lived (they were all originally from the same pueblo), and Teresa also had to send money back to Mexico to support her elderly parents and 16-year-old daughter.
On June 6, she planned to wake up at 9 a.m. to take a shower and go to work. When Amilcar, 22, stayed over, he usually left at 5 or 5:30 a.m., also to go to work, but today he happened to stay later.
At 6:30 a.m. they awoke to the sound of the front door opening. Teresa thought it might have been one of her housemates returning home from work, but she knew it was a stranger when she heard talking in English. In fact, her housemate Samiy Salazar had just opened the front door, and seven men and a woman pushed through it. Teresa heard them opening the other bedrooms, banging on the doors and shouting, ordering everyone to go into the living room. They entered Luis Sedeño Trujillo’s bedroom, waking him with a start. They pulled Cirilo Sedeño Trujillo, 23, out of bed, too, but gave him a chance to dress.
When the knocking came to Teresa’s door, which was locked, she shouted that she needed a moment to dress, grabbing whichever pants and shirt she found first. She didn’t want to unlock the door, but the constant banging was getting louder, so she opened the door before putting on shoes. The knocking had been coming from a blond woman of medium height, who then rushed into the room, shouting “Move!” The woman grabbed Teresa by the bicep and she and Amilcar staggered out of the bedroom and into the hallway as other officers searched the room.
Teresa thought they must have been police because of their dark green or blue uniforms, but she could not imagine why they would have come. “Why are they doing this when we’ve done nothing wrong?” she thought.
She and the seven other people sleeping in the apartment that morning were all brought to the living room, where Teresa tried to ask the officers who they were and why they were there. An officer guarded the back door so no one could escape. The agents lined up all the men on one side of the room, and the women and children on the other.
One of the officers spoke a little Spanish, but the female agent who had opened Teresa’s door told the residents to be quiet. “Shut up,” the agents barked over the four children’s wails.
One of the women who lived there, Norma Sedeño, 27, was holding her 7-year-old son, Alan, as he cried.
The officers asked for identification, and everyone gave their Mexican IDs — the only kind they had. Teresa said she had left hers in her room, so the female officer followed her to go get it; she also let her put on flip-flops. One man wore only boxers, and the officers permitted him to dress, but another wearing slippers was not allowed to put on shoes. “They are treating us like cattle,” Luis thought.
“Restroom,” Teresa kept saying to the female officer; she needed to use the toilet and that was the only way she knew to say it in English. But the officer wouldn’t let her go. “Restroom,” she repeated.
Teresa was pushed into the kitchen, which was dark except for the daylight peeking through the window. The female officer patted Teresa down, shackled Teresa’s hands in front of her and pushed her past the rickety wooden chairs further into the kitchen so the others could be handcuffed one by one: her boyfriend, Amilcar; Norma’s brothers, Cirilo and Luis; and Norma’s husband, Apolinar Flores.
Besides Teresa, the other women, who said they had young children, were not arrested. Norma’s 7-year-old son Alan, who was sitting next to her on the sofa crying and shaking, saw everything: from his parents getting pulled out of bed to his father getting handcuffed.
As they left, the officers handed Norma a paper on which was written: 450 Main Street, Room 501, Hartford, Connecticut, 06103. It was the address of the immigration court.
***
“They took my husband! They took my cousin!” Norma cried on the phone to Angelo Reyes, a Fair Haven business owner and developer. Children were screaming in the background. Standing in his laundromat on Lombard Street, Angelo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He thought this wasn’t real, wasn’t true, couldn’t be, couldn’t happen, not in New Haven, not in America.
It was not until he knocked on Norma’s door a few minutes later and saw the fear in her eyes that he knew this was real. The children were shaking. He spent an hour there trying to calm her down, meanwhile calling Junta for Progressive Action, a community organization whose headquarters on Grand Avenue was quickly becoming Fair Haven’s crisis center and war room.
***
It was 8 a.m. in City Hall, on Church Street downtown, two miles away. The mayor, John DeStefano Jr., sat in his opulent office facing Kica Matos, the city services administrator, and Emily Byrne, his policy analyst. They were discussing how to convince New Haven banks to accept the Elm City Resident Card, which the city had approved two days earlier.
DeStefano first floated the idea of a city-issued ID — available to any resident regardless of immigration status — in 2005. Undocumented immigrants, lacking any valid form of identification, were unable to participate in simple civic functions such as obtaining a library card or opening a bank account. They were afraid to report crimes they suffered or witnessed because authorities might ask for IDs. New Haven’s card was designed to give them access to libraries, beaches, parks and the dump. All residents were encouraged to get one, and the city would recognize any form of documentation, including those issued by foreign governments. This meant illegal immigrants could obtain a legal government ID card. The Board of Aldermen passed the program, the first of its kind in the nation, on June 4.
The meeting on the morning of June 6 was to work out some of the logistics of the card’s implementation, which was when, as the mayor remembers it, the phone at the front desk started ringing with calls from Fair Haven residents saying there was a raid. At 8 a.m. he called the New Haven Police Department to find out what was going on. (Byrne says she does not remember the specifics of what happened, and the police chief at the time, Francisco Ortiz, declined to say.) As Kica Matos remembers it, a page on the telephone interrupted their meeting. The mayor raised the headset to his ear; then his expression went blank.
“Does this have anything to do with the ID cards?” he said.
Matos turned to Byrne. She had feared but fully expected this to happen for a long time. “I think there’s a raid going on,” she said.
DeStefano hung up, and Matos’ fear was confirmed. The call was from Rob Smuts, the city’s chief administrative officer in charge of fire and police. At 7:15, he had just told the mayor, the NHPD’s non-emergency communications line received a call from ICE to inform them they were conducting a raid, which was already in progress. By 8 a.m., it was just about wrapping up. (Smuts says he could not remember the details of the morning.)
“We need to let the community know,” Matos said. “And we have to find out what’s happening to the detainees.” She said she had to start making calls.
Sure enough, by the time she ran out of the mayor’s office and into her own, her phone was already ringing. It was Norma Franceschi.
Everyone, it seemed, knew Norma Franceschi. She owned a grocery store on Castle Street in Fair Haven, and she was a woman who would give someone she was meeting for the first time a kiss on the cheek. At 6:30 that morning, her husband had gone to pick up Maria de Jesus, who everyone called Marichui, to take her to open up Norma’s store at 7. They were in the car when Marichui received a call from her cousin, Norma Sedeño, who was crying that the police had arrested her husband and cousins. Marichui started crying and called Norma Franceschi, who was still at her home in West Haven. “Norma! Norma!” she said. “Immigration is in New Haven. They took everybody!”
Franceschi had suspected this might happen after a confrontation with counter-protestors at a rally for the New Haven ID cards. Someone had shouted, “There will be consequences!” and she thought something was going to happen. She thought about the time in 1976 when immigration came to arrest her husband because, after immigrating from Argentina in 1971, their visa had expired and there was a lag before the new one was approved. They came early in the morning, when she had been watching TV, and she answered the door holding her two-year-old daughter. She would never forget how the first thing the tall, red-headed officer did was put his foot in the door so she couldn’t close it on him. She called the bakery to warn her husband so he could hide; and she called her attorney, a young Yale Law School graduate named Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67, who helped them get their paperwork in order.
Norma remembered all this and remembered what it felt like to fear Immigration, and then she thought that the first place she should go was St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Fair Haven. She got into her car and called Matos from the road. “Immigration is here,” she cried on the phone, “and they’re taking people away. We don’t know what’s going on. We need help.”
When Norma hung up, Matos’ first outgoing call was to John Lugo, a volunteer community organizer with the immigrant-rights group Unidad Latina en Accion. She told him there had been a raid and he should come over right away. And no, she was not kidding.
Lugo ran out of his house and into his car and tore down the streets toward City Hall as fast as the Toyota Tercel he bought for $500 could go. He had no time to think about how he had always thought it could never happen here, how he had heard about the raids in other cities but thought New Haven was safe, how it had an order that city police should not enforce federal immigration law, or how no one would ever feel safe again, because he was frantically driving with one hand and calling everyone he knew with his cell phone in the other, spreading the word about the raid.
When he arrived after five or 10 minutes, Matos told him all she knew, which was not much so far: just the call to the police and the panic in Fair Haven. She told him to start making calls to figure out what was going on.
“Man, [forget] this,” he interrupted her. “We should be out there. We should confront them.”
“Don’t waste your time,” Matos said. “We need you. You can’t help us from jail.” He started to argue. “You have to sit here!” she pressed him. It was not a suggestion.
He yielded and started dialing, surrounded by the constant shriek of ringing phones. He called community organizations, other volunteers, proprietors, anyone. But after an hour, he knew he couldn’t stay penned up in City Hall any longer. He told Matos he was hitting the streets, and now that he had cooled down a little, she let him go.
Driving toward Fair Haven, Lugo’s phone was still ringing constantly; he used so many minutes that his monthly phone bill, which typically ran about $150, would top $1,000. As he approached Grand Avenue, sweat was beginning to bead below his thick curly hair, even though it was a mild 61 degrees. On a typical day, Grand Avenue is crowded with people, blasting music or socializing beneath Spanish marquees as children play on the sidewalks; it has a street culture redolent of its inhabitants’ native lands. But today it was a ghost town. There was literally no one. Few cars. No people. No noise. Just emptiness.
***
Lucy Negron sat alone in her beauty parlor on Grand Avenue, staring outside at the vacated thoroughfare. She could have sworn she saw ICE vans roaming down the avenue. No one came into her store at all, and her regulars were calling to say they were too scared the leave the house. The weeks-long paralysis, she estimates, cost her parlor between $4,000 and $5,000.
After spending the morning driving around to businesses and houses, responding to distressed calls or alleged Immigration sightings, John Lugo started to get calls from panicked parents. Crying on the phone, mothers told him they couldn’t pick up their children at school because they were afraid of getting arrested if they went outside. So Lugo went around to schools picking up children, who got into his car petrified, convinced by their classmates’ teasing that their parents had been abducted. The staff at one Head Start center in Fair Haven decided that, even though the law required them to, they would not call the police if families were more than two hours late to pick up their children; they feared that children would be separated from undocumented parents. But none of the children’s parents were detained, and all 350 of the children in the center’s care were picked up, if not by their own parents then by friends or community members such as John Lugo.
Angelo Reyes, meanwhile, was making some 20 grocery runs for families who were afraid to go to a store. They told him they would rather have starved.
For Lugo and Angelo, the base of operations was Junta for Progressive Action’s headquarters on Grand Avenue, which since 9 a.m. had been packed with as many as 80 people carrying bags of clothes and wanting to hide or sleep in the basement. The cries of panic were punctuated by the phones ringing with more ICE sightings or distressed households. Junta’s entire staff, as well as 30 representatives from St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Fair Haven, started a phone bank, calling over 800 numbers of families in New Haven, telling them what had happened and what to do, until 11 p.m.
The priest at St. Rose, Father Jim Manship, heard of the raid at 7 that morning, and thought “What is my government doing? These are pot scrubbers and gardeners — not exactly threats to public safety.” Six months prior, when ICE started conducting mass raids at factories, Manship had helped the community plan contingencies should ICE come to a workplace in New Haven. But he never thought they would come knocking on people’s doors, pulling them out of bed.
In the afternoon, John Lugo and others hit the streets on patrol, donning shirts that read “No One is Illegal.” They handed out fliers telling people what to do if ICE came (be quiet and don’t open the door) and gave them a list of numbers to call in an emergency. Junta’s copy machine broke repeatedly throughout the day from running off thousands of copies.
The entire neighborhood descended into a game of telephone. Rumors flew about hundreds of arrests, ICE vans circling like vultures, ICE agents on every corner, barging into restaurants, knocking down doors of houses.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2009/09/28/a-safe-haven-raided/
Monday, July 13, 2009
The Feds' Unreasonable Searches
Courant.com
Judge properly stops deportation proceedings against four illegal aliens
July 11, 2009
When authorities enter a home to make an arrest, they are obliged to follow some basic legal procedures to avoid trampling fundamental rights. But that didn't happen often enough during Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps around New Haven two years ago.
We applaud the recent rulings by Immigration Judge Michael Straus decrying ICE agents' "egregious" violations of rights in the 2007 roundup.
Judge Straus is known as a tough judge, often sympathetic to government rationale for making arrests. But he was right to stop deportation hearings against four of the defendants who were not the targets of the ICE raids and for whom agents did not have proper warrants or probable cause for arrest.
The sweeps took place almost immediately after New Haven began giving out official ID cards to residents, and the timing appeared retaliatory.
Of the more than 30 people arrested over two days, agents had arrest warrants for only five. The agents had no search warrants for seven homes they entered, according to Michael Wishnie, the Yale law professor coordinating the defense.
One case is illustrative. Agents, with no search or arrest warrants, demanded to enter a home at 6:30 a.m. When a resident opened the door a crack, they swarmed in without his OK. They roughly handled a 10-year-old girl in the apartment and refused to answer questions. They didn't answer questions in court, either, refusing to submit to cross-examination.
Entering the country illegally is not to be condoned, but neither is ignoring the Constitution when entering homes and arresting people.
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-ice-raids-new-haven.art.artjul11,0,7711678.story
Judge properly stops deportation proceedings against four illegal aliens
July 11, 2009
When authorities enter a home to make an arrest, they are obliged to follow some basic legal procedures to avoid trampling fundamental rights. But that didn't happen often enough during Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps around New Haven two years ago.
We applaud the recent rulings by Immigration Judge Michael Straus decrying ICE agents' "egregious" violations of rights in the 2007 roundup.
Judge Straus is known as a tough judge, often sympathetic to government rationale for making arrests. But he was right to stop deportation hearings against four of the defendants who were not the targets of the ICE raids and for whom agents did not have proper warrants or probable cause for arrest.
The sweeps took place almost immediately after New Haven began giving out official ID cards to residents, and the timing appeared retaliatory.
Of the more than 30 people arrested over two days, agents had arrest warrants for only five. The agents had no search warrants for seven homes they entered, according to Michael Wishnie, the Yale law professor coordinating the defense.
One case is illustrative. Agents, with no search or arrest warrants, demanded to enter a home at 6:30 a.m. When a resident opened the door a crack, they swarmed in without his OK. They roughly handled a 10-year-old girl in the apartment and refused to answer questions. They didn't answer questions in court, either, refusing to submit to cross-examination.
Entering the country illegally is not to be condoned, but neither is ignoring the Constitution when entering homes and arresting people.
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-ice-raids-new-haven.art.artjul11,0,7711678.story
Thursday, July 9, 2009
ICE Changes its Story
Immigration agents in charge of the 2007 raid in New Haven can't keep their story straight
By Betsy Yagla
New Haven Advocate
Thursday, July 09, 2009
An internal investigation clears federal agents of any wrongdoing in the 2007 immigration raids in New Haven.
But what actually happened during the raid is called into question by contradictory reports, revealed in court documents, given by two agents.
In the early morning hours of June 6, 2007, undocumented immigrants in New Haven were startled awake by Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents barging into their homes and arresting them. The raids were widely viewed as retaliation for New Haven's bold immigrant-friendly stance — the city's first resident ID cards had been issued just days before.
The community was outraged and Yale Law School students swept in to take testimony from witnesses and those arrested. Those statements were consistent: Immigrants said the agents didn't knock on doors, didn't ask for permission to enter and didn't identify themselves before arresting 32 people. Those left behind were terrified and confused.
New Haven Mayor John DeStefano was livid, and he, along with U.S. Sens. Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, sent angry letters to Homeland Security complaining and demanding answers.
ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility responded by investigating — but didn't interview the arrested immigrants or witnesses.
"We made a common, straightforward request," says Mike Wishnie, a Yale law professor who is leading the school's legal clinic's defense team for the immigrants.
Wishnie asked that ICE not use witnesses' statements against them. "To our surprise they said 'Absolutely not, we never do that.' It appears they don't understand law enforcement investigation 101. If you want to get to the bottom of what happened and you're an independent investigator, why wouldn't you want our cooperation?"
The result, says Wishnie, is a one-sided report. And, it should be no surprise that the report clears ICE of any wrongdoing: "As a result of this investigation, no findings of misconduct were discovered," the report summarizes.
One by one, the 68-page report refutes 17 sworn statements given by the arrested immigrants fighting deportation. The report says all ICE officers involved "stated that officers clearly knocked and announced their presence at all locations; consent was obtained ..."
That report is partly based on sworn statements given by the agents involved in the raids.
But those statements, and the report, aren't consistent with other statements made by ICE agents. Two in particular — deportation officer David Hamilton and supervisory detention and deportation officer Richard McCaffrey — gave sworn affidavits in June 2008 for the internal report and sworn declarations in February, 2009 for the court case.
The 2008 statements and the internal report only came to light after a long Freedom of Information fight waged by two immigrants-rights groups, Unidad Latina en Accion and Junta for Progressive Action.
Those documents show ICE agents can't keep their story straight.
In the 2008 statements, Hamilton and McCaffrey repeatedly answer "I don't know" to several questions. In the 2009 statements, they suddenly remember.
In Hamilton's 2008 retelling, he says he "was assigned to perimeter security at each location," meaning he stayed outside the apartments. He was only in earshot once to hear an officer get consent to enter an apartment. He wasn't present, he says, for any initial questioning of the immigrants because he was outside.
In his new version of events, he's inside one apartment on Peck Street. He says he knocked on the door at 200 Peck St., entered the apartment and showed someone a picture of a "fugitive alien that we were looking for." Then, Hamilton says, McCaffrey arrived. They asked the immigrant for ID and followed him into his bedroom.
McCaffrey, too, contradicts himself. In 2008 he says he wasn't present for any interviews or arrests of the immigrants. But in 2009 McCaffrey now recalls interviewing the immigrant at 200 Peck St.
Wishnie says it seems as though the agents met with the ICE attorneys, "at which time the agents remember what they couldn't remember before, and seem to have seen things that, six months before, they didn't see."
The federal immigration judge who heard the deportation cases of those swept up in 2007 has sided sometimes with ICE (he's ordered 11 to be deported, and they are appealing that decision), and sometimes with the immigrants (four won their cases). When the judge sided with the immigrants it was because he believed ICE violated their rights by entering their homes without permission.
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=13721
By Betsy Yagla
New Haven Advocate
Thursday, July 09, 2009
An internal investigation clears federal agents of any wrongdoing in the 2007 immigration raids in New Haven.
But what actually happened during the raid is called into question by contradictory reports, revealed in court documents, given by two agents.
In the early morning hours of June 6, 2007, undocumented immigrants in New Haven were startled awake by Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents barging into their homes and arresting them. The raids were widely viewed as retaliation for New Haven's bold immigrant-friendly stance — the city's first resident ID cards had been issued just days before.
The community was outraged and Yale Law School students swept in to take testimony from witnesses and those arrested. Those statements were consistent: Immigrants said the agents didn't knock on doors, didn't ask for permission to enter and didn't identify themselves before arresting 32 people. Those left behind were terrified and confused.
New Haven Mayor John DeStefano was livid, and he, along with U.S. Sens. Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, sent angry letters to Homeland Security complaining and demanding answers.
ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility responded by investigating — but didn't interview the arrested immigrants or witnesses.
"We made a common, straightforward request," says Mike Wishnie, a Yale law professor who is leading the school's legal clinic's defense team for the immigrants.
Wishnie asked that ICE not use witnesses' statements against them. "To our surprise they said 'Absolutely not, we never do that.' It appears they don't understand law enforcement investigation 101. If you want to get to the bottom of what happened and you're an independent investigator, why wouldn't you want our cooperation?"
The result, says Wishnie, is a one-sided report. And, it should be no surprise that the report clears ICE of any wrongdoing: "As a result of this investigation, no findings of misconduct were discovered," the report summarizes.
One by one, the 68-page report refutes 17 sworn statements given by the arrested immigrants fighting deportation. The report says all ICE officers involved "stated that officers clearly knocked and announced their presence at all locations; consent was obtained ..."
That report is partly based on sworn statements given by the agents involved in the raids.
But those statements, and the report, aren't consistent with other statements made by ICE agents. Two in particular — deportation officer David Hamilton and supervisory detention and deportation officer Richard McCaffrey — gave sworn affidavits in June 2008 for the internal report and sworn declarations in February, 2009 for the court case.
The 2008 statements and the internal report only came to light after a long Freedom of Information fight waged by two immigrants-rights groups, Unidad Latina en Accion and Junta for Progressive Action.
Those documents show ICE agents can't keep their story straight.
In the 2008 statements, Hamilton and McCaffrey repeatedly answer "I don't know" to several questions. In the 2009 statements, they suddenly remember.
In Hamilton's 2008 retelling, he says he "was assigned to perimeter security at each location," meaning he stayed outside the apartments. He was only in earshot once to hear an officer get consent to enter an apartment. He wasn't present, he says, for any initial questioning of the immigrants because he was outside.
In his new version of events, he's inside one apartment on Peck Street. He says he knocked on the door at 200 Peck St., entered the apartment and showed someone a picture of a "fugitive alien that we were looking for." Then, Hamilton says, McCaffrey arrived. They asked the immigrant for ID and followed him into his bedroom.
McCaffrey, too, contradicts himself. In 2008 he says he wasn't present for any interviews or arrests of the immigrants. But in 2009 McCaffrey now recalls interviewing the immigrant at 200 Peck St.
Wishnie says it seems as though the agents met with the ICE attorneys, "at which time the agents remember what they couldn't remember before, and seem to have seen things that, six months before, they didn't see."
The federal immigration judge who heard the deportation cases of those swept up in 2007 has sided sometimes with ICE (he's ordered 11 to be deported, and they are appealing that decision), and sometimes with the immigrants (four won their cases). When the judge sided with the immigrants it was because he believed ICE violated their rights by entering their homes without permission.
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=13721
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