Three Ecuadorian men who lived in South Portland have filed petitions with Maine’s U.S. District Court asking a judge to stop them from being put through expedited removal proceedings for deportation.
The federal court will have to decide whether the government is illegally holding the men under a national law for expedited removals, which only applies to people who have been in the United States for less than two years. The men say they’ve been in the country longer than that and that they’re missing out on crucial due process rights baked into the traditional removal process.
This is the latest instance in a series of legal challenges filed in Maine this year that ask the federal bench to wade deeper into cases normally handled by immigration judges overseen by the Department of Justice. Last week, for the first time in Maine, one of the state’s federal judges ordered that immigration officials release a man they had taken into custody.
On Wednesday, emergency orders were issued by three judges — Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker, U.S. District Judge John Woodcock and U.S. District Judge Stacey Neumann — in the cases of the three Ecuadorian men. The orders bar the Department of Homeland Security from transferring the men out of state while Neumann, who is now overseeing all of their cases, decides whether they should be released.
Their attorneys wrote in court records that they believe DHS was planning to fly all three men to Texas.
An assistant U.S. attorney has until Sept. 12 to file a reply to the men’s claims.
The men were living in South Portland and were arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in August, according to petitions seeking their release.
One of the men, Flavio Bladamir Chollo Chafla, suffers epilepsy and requires medication for his seizures, according to his petition. His attorneys, Shatanu Kumar Chatterjee and Nealy Fleming, wrote that they were concerned by how the trip would affect his condition.
The other two men, Luis German Lema Temay and Victor Manuel Tenesaca Lema, have children who were born in the United States in 2022, according to birth certificates attached to their petitions.
When someone is arrested by immigration officials, they are typically placed in removal proceedings that are overseen by immigration judges in an administrative court run by the U.S. Department of Justice. There, the men’s attorneys argue in the petitions, immigrants have hearings, can seek bond and are able to file appeals if they disagree with a decision. Only a judge can decide whether someone should be deported.
The expedited removal process bypasses all of that, the men’s attorneys claim. It allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, instead of an immigration judge, to decide whether someone should be deported and it offers no hearings or opportunities for an appeal. Under the law, people can only be subjected to expedited removal if they’ve been in the United States for less than two years.
In each petition, the attorneys argued that their clients were unlawfully detained and “will be unlawfully denied all required process in the Immigration Court, all potential appeals from that process, and access to certain forms of relief from removal that would be potentially available in the Immigration Court.”
Several of Maine’s federal judges have ruled that they have the authority to order relief in these cases when there are constitutional issues at play.
Last week, Neumann ordered that an Ecuadorian man, who was arrested by Border Patrol in July, be released after the man filed his own petition against the government because he said they denied his due process rights to be heard by an immigration judge. Border Patrol had flown him to Texas within hours of him filing his petition, which an attorney for Border Patrol said was unrelated to his legal challenge.
He had been released from ICE custody by Tuesday, according to court records.
Earlier this year, Walker ordered that a Massachusetts woman being held at the Cumberland County Jail by ICE receive a bond hearing after she filed a petition seeking release.
And, in another case, Woodcock temporarily barred immigration officials from moving Eyidi Ambila, who came to the U.S. from the Democratic Republic of Congo, out of state. Ambila’s petition in federal court is still on pause so the Board of Immigration Appeals can consider his larger request for protection under the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture, which prevents the U.S. from sending people to places where they would suffer torture.
