Two men arrested by Border Patrol at a jobsite in Bethel and moved out of state were released from a jail in Ohio last week, despite a federal judge’s orders that they be returned home to New England.
Paula Esteves, their attorney, said her clients had been released “in the cold in Ohio, knowing no one” and without means to return home to Massachusetts, where they have pending immigration court cases.
Volunteers from immigrant support groups in Ohio helped the men — Elder Benjamin Ortiz Sintuj and Selvin Isais Situj Garcia — contact their families and buy bus tickets on the morning of Feb. 3 so they could get home, she said.
U.S. District Judge John Woodcock had ordered on Jan. 28 that the two men be flown back to Maine by Feb. 2, after learning U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had sent them to a facility in Louisiana in violation of a temporary order.
A day after that deadline, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maine said in a court filing that it had learned from ICE that the men had instead been released that morning around 8:30 a.m. The men had been brought to Ohio two days earlier, according to court records.
Woodcock, in his rulings, ordered ICE to pay for attorney fees and the bus tickets. He wrote that he didn’t believe the agency had “violated the court’s order in bad faith” by releasing the men in Ohio. Woodcock also ordered that ICE can’t detain the men again without 48 hours’ notice to their attorney.
An assistant U.S. attorney representing ICE said Tuesday that the office has no comment on Woodcock’s orders.
Esteves said she was informed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Feb. 3 that her clients had been released, about two hours after it happened. She said a federal prosecutor told her he learned the news around the same time.
“They violated a federal court order,” she said, “and even though my clients were released, they were released in the middle of Ohio. They had to figure out a way to go home.”
Esteves said federal officials have only returned the belongings of one of the two clients since his arrest in Bethel. She said the ordeal was harrowing, “but they’re home and they’re safe.”
Both men are construction workers and Guatemalan citizens who had been living in the country for several years, according to court records. Immigration officials allege they have been living in the U.S. illegally.
For the last year, lawyers have said, ICE has been shuffling immigrants across different states and facilities, with little advanced notice to courts and their attorneys.
Several of the nine men arrested by Border Patrol at the jobsite in Bethel on Jan. 15 have filed petitions in federal court, asking that they be released and given bond hearings and alleging they were detained in violation of their constitutional rights. Most of the men had come to Maine from Massachusetts, according to court records.
Woodcock learned last month that another man arrested in Bethel, Cristian Yair de la Cruz Guillermo, was still in Maine despite an earlier report from the U.S. Attorney’s Office that he had been transferred to Massachusetts.
Federal prosecutors said they notified the court as soon as they received the correct information about Guillermo’s whereabouts.
Federal judges in Maine have ordered that detainees be released from ICE custody in other recent cases, as well.
On Jan. 23, Woodcock and U.S. District Judge Stacey Neumann ordered ICE to release two immigrants whom the agency had moved from Maine in violation of their no-transfer orders. ICE had moved all of its inmates from the Cumberland County Jail the previous night, after the sheriff criticized the agency for the way it arrested one of the county’s corrections officers.
