Minneapolis — A federal judge on Thursday extended her order requiring federal authorities to give immigrants detained in Minnesota access to attorneys immediately after their arrest and before they are transferred out of the state.
United States region Judge Nancy Brazile He issued a preliminary injunction requiring that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement must ensure that people detained in a Minneapolis detention facility have the right to prompt access to attorneys and to communicate with them privately while their cases are pursued.
“Due process is not a keep-away game,” the judge wrote. “ICE recognizes detainees’ right to counsel in theory and written policy, but not in practice. Instead, it has placed one obstacle after another in front of detainees and their attorneys, preventing communication between clients and attorneys.”
Brazil’s decision came after A Temporary restraining order It was issued on February 12, when it said it appeared the federal agency had failed to plan how to protect the constitutional rights of people detained during the Trump administration’s anti-immigration crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge.
“The Constitution does not allow the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then ignore their constitutional rights because it would be extremely difficult to respect those rights,” Brazile wrote in February.
The judge on Thursday extended her original order requiring the government to ensure that every noncitizen detained at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building is given the opportunity to contact an attorney within one hour of being taken into custody.
She insisted on her requirement that detained persons not be transferred out of state during the first 72 hours of their detention to ensure they have adequate time to reach lawyers and that their lawyers have time to try to stop any transfers.
Human Rights Defenders filed the lawsuit in January, saying detained immigrants have a fundamental right to a lawyer. She welcomed the decision, which will remain in place pending further action.
“The ability to speak freely and privately to counsel is critical to due process and essential to protecting people from unfair sentences, forced detention and life-threatening deportation,” Michelle Garnett McKenzie, executive director of the public interest law firm, said in a statement.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on the ruling.
During a hearing last week, Jeffrey Dubner, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told the judge that the government’s compliance with her temporary restraining order had been “spotty at best.”
The judge issued her preliminary order the same day Border Caesar Tom Homan It has been officially announced that Operation Metro Surge has ended. Government officials say new arrests have declined since then, with the number of ICE officers in Minnesota falling from a high of about 3,000 to near its previous levels of more than 100. They say there are times now when there are no people detained at Whipple.
Government Attorney Christina Parascandola told the judge that ICE had complied with her order and that extending it with a preliminary injunction was not necessary. Conditions in Whipple “returned to a more manageable pace” as the surge ended, she said.
But local immigration attorneys testified that it was often impossible to reach their clients in Whipple, even when they went there in person, or to obtain information about whether their clients were there or had been transferred to larger facilities in Texas.
One of the attorneys, Han Sandison, testified that when she and a few others were allowed inside under a judge’s order to see conditions there, she was unable to operate the phones. In the only place where the phones worked, ICE officers could hear every word, she said.