Three men arrested last month by the Border Patrol must be released, a federal judge ruled over the weekend, because they were arrested under the wrong law and denied their legal right to a bond hearing.
U.S. District Judge Stacey Neumann ordered on Sunday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement release the men, who are from Ecuador, until they are given bond hearings in immigration court. She set a two-week deadline for the bond hearings to be set.
Neumann’s order comes as several civil rights groups announced that they filed a class action lawsuit in Massachusetts on Monday against the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. The groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, claim ICE has “abruptly and unlawfully reversed decades of settled immigration practice in order to deny immigration bond hearings to potentially millions of people in immigration proceedings nationwide.”
The Ecuadorian men — Flavio Bladamir Chollo Chafla, Luis German Lema Temay and Victor Manuel Tenesaca Lema — were arrested by Border Patrol agents during a traffic stop in Bowdoinham on Aug. 23, according to court records. They filed petitions in federal court more than a week later, claiming agents were holding them under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that’s intended for new arrivals.
All three men have lived in the country continuously for more than two years, their attorney said, working as roofers and living in South Portland. Two of the men are fathers and their children are young U.S. citizens.
Neumann ruled that, because of how long the men have been in the United States, they are generally entitled to a bond hearing, where it’s up to ICE to prove why the men shouldn’t be released pending their immigration court dates.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maine, which is representing ICE, argued last week that they were using the appropriate law, because the men were never legally admitted to the country. Neumann said in the order that the men initially crossed the border undetected or without inspection but have since applied for asylum, citing threats of violence against them in their home country.
ICE said they did not intend to place the men in expedited removal proceedings, which the men’s attorney argued in previous filings was a reasonable risk based on the statute ICE used to detain them. ICE acknowledged that it wasn’t offering the men bond hearings, but said the men would have other opportunities to challenge their removal.
“Petitioners’ rights to due process have been unconstitutionally deprived by the Government’s actions in this case,” Neumann ruled.
Maine judges are increasingly weighing in on immigration-related matters that are typically handled by an administrative court overseen by the DOJ.
In August, Neumann ordered that ICE release a man after determining that the Border Patrol agents who arrested him ignored his requests to meet with an immigration judge. In another case over the summer, Maine’s Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker ordered the Department of Justice to give a bond hearing to a Brazilian woman being held at the Cumberland County Jail.
