By WPRO News and The Associated Press
The Massachusetts ACLU claimed on Tuesday that federal immigration agencies are violating the rights of immigrants seeking legal status by setting a deportation “trap” at their required interviews.
The ACLU’s criticism stems from a lawsuit they filed on behalf of Lilian Calderon, a Providence mother of two who was brought to the United States from Guatemala when she was three, and was recently arrested as she tried to clarify her immigration status. The ACLU said the government is “tricking” people like Calderon who were trying to do the right thing – in Calderon’s case, that meant verifying her marriage to a legal citizen in a meeting that ended in her arrest and detainment.
“Instead of using the interview process for that, they were actually using it to bait people into coming in so they could be arrested by ICE and that’s pretty despicable,” said ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown. “They have no standards whatsoever. They’re willing to pick up anybody, even if in cases like Ms. Calderon’s, she’s following a process the government itself encouraged her to follow.”
The ACLU said it learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in collaboration with Citizenship and Immigration Services, used the waiver process as a “trap to bring individuals in for interviews so that ICE could detain them, separate them from their families, and seek to deport them.”
“That is what happened with Ms. Calderon, who was immediately arrested by ICE agents after the interview and then held in jail for a month until an ACLU habeas corpus petition obtained her release,” said the ACLU in a statement.
ACLU said it filed a legal memorandum on Monday that includes deposition excerpts of top immigration officials for the New England region, in which they “acknowledged they made no effort to determine whether a person they planned to arrest was pursuing this lawful waiver process.” The ACLU claimed the two agencies worked hand-in-hand and in some instances, ICE officers asked CIS to spread out the interviews on different days so that ICE could arrange to arrest everyone appearing for interviews.
ICE, citing the lawsuit, originally declined to comment, but spokesperson John Mohan later said any allegations of “inappropriate coordination” between ICE and CIS are “unfounded.”
“This routine coordination within the Department of Homeland Security, not unlike the cooperative efforts we maintain with many other federal partners, is lawful and legitimate in the work we do to uphold our nation’s immigration laws, and we look forward to continuing to maintain this critical working relationship with our valued federal partner agency,“ Mohan said.
Both sides are due back in court next week.
