Detained immigrant rights and sanctuary movement leader Ravi Ragbir is free, after U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release him after taking him into custody during what was supposed to be a routine check-in earlier this month. Under the Trump administration, unshackled federal immigration agents have made routine check-ins anything but routine:
On Monday, United States District Judge Katherine Forrest ruled that the “the government acted wrongly” and with “unnecessary cruelty” in detaining the well-known immigrant advocate during a routine check-in earlier this month, and ordered his immediate release from a correctional facility in Orange County, New York. Noting that, “there is, and ought to be in this great country, the freedom to say goodbye,” Forrest repeatedly condemned the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s actions. “This abrupt and by all accounts unnecessary detention, a step in the direction of deportation, was wrong,” she declared.
News of the unexpected ruling quickly spread from the packed courtroom to the overflow room to outside the courthouse, where dozens of supporters had been marching silently in protest of Ragbir’s detention. “It was one of the most intense experiences of my life,” said Hansell Patterson, a volunteer with the New Sanctuary Coalition, where Ragbir is an executive director. “There were tears of joy because the judge really nailed it.”
Ragbir was detained just days after another immigrant rights and sanctuary movement leader Jean Montrevil was arrested and deported to Haiti over a decades-old drug charge that he had already served time for. Their arrests left no doubt in the minds of many activists that ICE is intentionally targeting immigrant rights leaders.
“Ravi’s arrest is part of a disturbing pattern,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “ICE is targeting immigrant advocates who dare to express dissent against the administration’s cruel deportation agenda.”
Ragbir became a permanent resident in 1994, but this was revoked following a 2001 wire fraud conviction. “He spent about two years in detention but was released under supervision in 2008 while his case moved through immigration courts”:
Over the following decade, he became a prominent voice in New York’s immigrant community, testifying before the city council and once meeting with President Barack Obama’s transition team to discuss immigration policy, according to his attorneys. He married a U.S. citizen in 2010.
During that time, he received work authorization and four stays of removal. The government’s court papers show he checked in regularly with ICE as required.
Eventually, Ragbir’s appeals ran out and he received a final order of deportation. His last stay was valid through Jan. 19, according to court documents. But on Jan. 11, during a check-in with immigration agents, ICE took Ragbir into custody. Ragbir was apparently so shocked by the decision that he lost consciousness and had to be taken to the hospital, court records show.
In her stirring and forceful ruling, the judge said that “since being released from prison … Ragbir had lived the life of a ‘redeemed man’”:
“… if due process means anything at all, it means that we must look at the totality of circumstances and determine whether we have dealt fairly when we are depriving a person of the most essential aspects of life, liberty and family,” Forrest said.
It was wrong to “pluck him out of his life without a moment’s notice, remove him from his family and community without a moment’s notice,” she said. “The process that is due here is the allowance that he know and understand that the time has come, that he must organize his affairs, and that he do so by a date certain.”
Since being released from prison, Forrest said, Ragbir had lived the life of a “redeemed man.” She said the government had offered no evidence that he had acted unlawfully, nor any evidence that he would not have left the country on his own accord, as many immigrants in his position are allowed to do.
“Taking such a man, and there are many such men and women like him, and subjecting him to what is rightfully understood as no different or better than penal detention, is certainly cruel,” the judge wrote. “ . . . The Constitution commands better.”
But while Ragbir has returned home, he could still be at risk of deportation in the future. His appeal is ongoing, and he has another court date next month. In the meantime, he’s continuing to speak out against the racist, mass deportation policies that have targeted people of color.
“This is ethnic cleansing,” he told the New York Daily News. “We have built this country. They want to destroy it. This is about removing people of color and bringing in the Norways, bringing in the Europeans and getting rid of all the ‘shithole countries.’ We have to stop this.”