Whether the Trump Administration’s local band of ICE and Homeland Security officials are inept or deliberately lawless, the agencies’ clear disregard for the law and Constitution must stop.
A bevy of court hearings in federal courts in Denver over the past several days revealed ICE agents and officials have little or no understanding of or regard for the law.
“It is not something the court will tolerate,” U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney told local ICE officials in court, according to Colorado Public Radio reports, after outlining numerous egregious legal missteps and potential abuses. “It’s a due process violation … it’s truly egregious in terms of a Constitutional violation.”
The hearings made clear that over the last several weeks, at least 18 people have either been held in Aurora’s ICE detention center or other detention facilities longer than approved by a court, or they were even wrongfully re-arrested after their release was court-ordered.
Judges made clear that it’s apparent ICE officials are either not even bothering to read court instructions, or they are unable to understand them, or they’re willingly violating court orders, the law and the Constitution and mistreating detainees as they please.
The testimony has been chilling.
An excuse offered to the courts by some ICE officials is that they’re busy and it’s all very confusing to them.
An assistant ICE field office director offered a judge a “the dog ate my homework” excuse when she said she overlooked a court order for several days as it sat in an ICE email queue, CPR reported.
One incident that came before the court was not only egregious in how a detainee was treated, but illustrative of how Congress, state lawmakers and higher courts must intervene now.
A man detained by ICE said he was released from the Aurora ICE facility and then re-arrested by agents who took sadistic pleasure in the stunt.
“They handcuffed me and handcuffed me to my waist, and they put us in a van, me and four other people. And we drove from Aurora ICE Detention Center all the way to the Centennial office,” an undocumented immigrant told the court, according to CPR reports. At his release, he took one step away from the agents and they grabbed him and arrested him again.
“I was telling one of the ICE agents, ‘Hey, I’m still in the process of fighting my case. I don’t know if you guys are rearresting us, but it feels like it,” the man told CPR News. “And the ICE agent, he said, ‘You guys found a way to get out. You guys found a loophole to get out legally. So we found a way,’ and he said it sarcastically; he said it with a smirk on his face. He said, so we found a way to re-arrest you guys. And then he said, ‘legally.’”
Except they didn’t.
The bizarre behavior is not just unprofessional and cruel; it’s unconstitutional, illegal and intolerable, the courts clearly point out.
All this comes on top of years of reports of mistreatment of detainees at the privately operated Aurora GEO ICE detention center, including a recent report where a 79-year-old disabled Ugandan Anglican priest had to be carried out by fellow inmates during his release because ICE officials withheld a wheelchair for the man past the jail’s gate, refusing to allow a car to pull up for him.
Aurora Congressperson Jason Crow has long pushed for transparency in how detainees are treated, and mistreated, at the facility, regularly battling efforts by the detention center to withhold or hide information.
Earlier this summer, ICE officials refused to cooperate with local and state health officials in determining whether an active case of tuberculosis inside the jail had spread to other detainees or staff members, or whether the infection might even have made it out of the jail and into the community.’
All of these incidents and reports point to something like a lawless regime in North Korea or Iran, not government officials in the United States — until now.
State and local government officials must work with state and federal lawmakers to rein in this insurgent operation and stop these widespread human rights and constitutional violations now.
