Immigrations agents arrested a U.S. citizen and created warrants after an arrest, lawyers say in court
Chicago attorneys with the National Immigrant Justice Center and the ACLU of Illinois accused the federal government in court Thursday of violating immigration law and the constitutional rights of at least 22 people who were arrested and detained in the midwest since President Donald Trump’s inauguration as part of his crackdown on immigration.
Two people are still in custody, 19 were released on bond and one has already been deported.
Attorneys are asking for the immediate release of people still detained, bond reimbursements, weekly reports on immigration arrests and additional training and discipline of federal agents involved in the arrests.
The motion filed against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said federal agents arrested at least one person without probable cause. Attorneys also accused the federal government of making arrests without proper warrants and creating warrants in the field after the arrests.
Attorneys say these actions violate the Nava Settlement — a 2018 class-action lawsuit filed in response to unlawful arrests by ICE agents who used traffic stops and other tactics to make arrests without a warrant. Under the agreement, ICE officials can conduct a warrantless arrest if they believe an individual is likely to escape but they must provide evidence. But in the motion filed Thursday in federal court in Chicago, attorneys said federal agents since January “failed to assess whether there was probable cause that an individual was likely to flee before a warrant could be issued.”
“No one disputes that ICE has authority to do immigration enforcement in the U.S., in Chicago, anywhere in the U.S.,” said Mark Fleming, of the National Immigrant Justice Center’s federal litigation project. “But they only have authority to do it under the laws that Congress have passed or are part of the legal limitations of the US Constitution.”
Fleming says the rhetoric of mass deportation is putting a lot of pressure on federal immigration officials to get their detention and arrest numbers up.
“In order to do this mass deportation that the administration has demanded of them, [federal agents] are going way outside the bounds of the legal guardrails around arrest and deprivation of liberty, both within the immigration laws but also under the U.S. Constitution,” Fleming said. “[ICE agents] believed that they had developed a work around the settlement, albeit an unlawful one.”
An ICE spokesman declined to answer questions, saying the department doesn’t comment “on litigation proceedings or outcomes.”
Cases include a Chicago resident who is a U.S. citizen
The 22 cases include Chicago resident Julio Noriega, 54, a U.S. citizen who, according to court documents, was arrested, handcuffed and spent most of the night at an ICE processing center in suburban Broadview. He was never questioned about his citizenship and was only released after agents looked at his ID.
“I was born in Chicago, Illinois and am a United States citizen,” Noriega said in his statement, adding that on Jan. 31, after buying pizza in Berwyn he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. Officers took away his wallet, which had his ID and social security card. “They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.”
In another case Abel Orozco-Ortega was detained outside his home in suburban Lyons without a warrant, just as he was arriving home from buying tamales. Federal agents were looking for one of his sons, who is about 20 years younger. But arrested Orozco-Ortega instead.
In his statement, Orozco-Ortega, 47, said an agent who identified as a police officer approached his car and asked to see a driver's license. Orozco-Ortega was arrested shortly after showing a “Temporary Visitor’s” driver’s license, which used to be given to non-citizens in Illinois.
Instead of releasing him, federal agents allegedly kept him in the back of the vehicle, and purportedly created an administrative warrant while Orozco-Ortega was handcuffed, said Fleming, the National Immigrant Justice Center attorney. Orozco-Ortega has been detained at the Clay County Jail in Indiana for about a month.
“[Federal agents] have seemingly developed a pattern or practice of trying to evade the [Nava] settlement by arresting people with … quote, unquote, administrative warrants that they are creating in the field, as they've already had the person detained,” Fleming said.
In another case, in Liberty, Missouri, 12 restaurant workers were barricaded inside a Mexican restaurant, guarded by armed Department of Homeland Security agents who then arrested the workers without a warrant, according to the legal document filed on Thursday. Missouri is one of six states, along with Illinois, covered by the Nava settlement. In the document, attorneys argue the agents tried to cover up these settlement violations by allegedly providing arrest documents that were backfilled after the fact to justify the warrantless arrests.
The arrests since Trump took office not only violate the Nava settlement and federal immigration law, attorneys argue, but also the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure.
Fleming said the majority of the 22 individuals cited in the court filing do not have criminal records. The most serious offense, he said, was a DUI.