A judge found that federal agents adopted an “arrest first, ask questions later” approach, ignoring legal requirements around when immigrants can be detained. (MarkTheSpot.org)
A federal judge has ruled that federal agents can no longer arrest people in D.C. on immigration violations without a warrant or probable cause to believe they could potentially flee if not detained.
It is the second significant legal loss for the Trump administration over its activities in D.C. in as many weeks. In late November, another federal judge found that the deployment of the National Guard to help fight crime in the city was unlawful.
In Tuesday’s 88-page ruling, Judge Beryl Howell wrote that federal agents – largely from ICE, but also Customs and Border Patrol and other agencies operating in D.C. – had adopted an “arrest first, ask questions later” approach, ignoring legal requirements around when and how immigrants can be detained.
“It’s a massive win both practically and just in terms of sending a message and holding the administration accountable,” says Austin Rose, an attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which sued the administration in late September on behalf of four immigrants who were arrested in the wake of Trump’s takeover of D.C. in mid-August. “They’ve just been roaming round the city arresting people who appear Latino without any regard of who they are.” (In some cases, they have been assisted by MPD officers.)
That’s what José Escobar Molina, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said happened to him. A native of El Salvador who came to D.C. in 1998, Escobar Molina was picked up by ICE on August 21. According to Molina, the agents didn’t ask him any questions and ignored his offer to show them his papers. He was sent to a holding facility in Northern Virginia and later Richmond before being released. The Trump administration claimed that he had been arrested because he was in the country illegally and had been charged with assault in 2019; but the criminal charge had been dropped and Escobar Molina had applied to renew his Temporary Protected Status.
“They were just trying to fill arrest quotas,” says Rose.
Between August 1 and October 16, 1,147 people were arrested on immigration violations in D.C., according to data collected by the Deportation Data Project.
In her ruling, Howell noted that since Trump had flooded D.C. with federal agents, “warrantless civil immigration arrests… have proliferated.” She cited an analysis that found, in a roughly one month period between August and September, 40% of all arrests in the city were immigration related.
After the ruling, officers will “have to assess whether the person is a flight risk and whether they need to be detained,” says Rose. “Our hope is that them being forced to do so will lead to fewer people being arrested because many of these people are not flight risks. They do not need to be whisked away to a deportation center across the country.”
The D.C. lawsuit was filed by the ACLU of D.C., the National Immigration Project, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, immigrant advocacy group CASA, and the law firm of Covington and Burling.
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