ACLU And Others Sue DHS Over Unconstitutional Detentions
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Everybody in the U.S. has Constitutional rights, including undocumented immigrants. But the Trump administration is doing their darnedest to make you think otherwise. It’s great to see a group of southern California residents and activist organizations standing up against the fascism.
Via the Los Angeles Daily News:
The lawsuit accuses federal immigration authorities of racial profiling, making unlawful arrests, not properly identifying themselves amid immigration raids, holding detainees in poor conditions and denying them the right to a lawyer.
“Armed, masked goons in unmarked cars have descended in our communities and have stopped and rounded people up from all walks of life,” said Mohammad Tajsar, a senior attorney with ACLU, “often at gunpoint and without any justification.”
Attorneys said they’re requesting temporary restraining orders to stop federal immigration authorities from making stops without suspicion, arrests without probable cause and denial of access to counsel to detainees ahead of a federal court date.
The plaintiffs have started a class-action suit, presumably to allow a nationwide injunction in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling.
The allegations are horrifying and downright un-American.
More from the Daily News:
Authorities at immigration detention facilities have denied lawyers with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center from meeting with their clients or entering the facilities to talk with others about potential legal representation, said Director of Litigation Alvaro Huerta. Detainees have been pushed to sign papers giving up their rights and leading to their deportation before they’re allowed to speak with a lawyer, Huerta said.
Maria, the wife of a man detained while working at a car wash last month, said she learned he was taken through a TikTok that her niece sent her. Since he was taken to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, Maria’s husband told her that officials at the overcrowded facility denied him his diabetes medication for two weeks.
Emily’s family calls immigration authorities each day since immigration agents detained her uncle at Bubble Bath Hand Car Wash in Torrance last month and have no answers, she said. At one point, she said, authorities said her uncle wasn’t being kept in an L.A. facility, but later that day he called the family from that location.
DHS is playing the victim, natch. Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs Tricia McLaughin insisted conditions at ICE detention centers are better than at most U.S. prisons (never mind that prison inmates have gone through the legal process and been convicted of crimes). McLaughlin also demanded, “politicians, activist and ‘journalists’ must turn the temperature down and tone down the rhetoric.”
Trump and his Nazi-like rhetoric gets a pass, of course.