Campaign Action
Trump administration officials from the top down keep insisting that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients have nothing to worry about, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have already been targeting them for arrest and deportation. Last year, Seattle resident Daniel Ramirez Medina became one of the first DACA recipients of the Trump era to be arrested by ICE, when he was swept up in a raid that was initially targeting his dad. He was finally released from custody six weeks later, but not before being falsely accused of gang affiliations and stripped of his DACA protections. Now he’s fighting to win them back:
Last year, Ramirez's lawyers—one of whom is a DACA recipient himself—argued that Ramirez was unlawfully detained and denied due process. On Tuesday, those lawyers filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to restore Ramirez's DACA status while the lawsuit is pending.
“Quite simply, Daniel must have his DACA status restored because it never should have been removed in the first place,” said Ethan Dettmer, a member of Ramirez’s legal team, said in a statement. “Daniel is the father of a U.S. citizen, and the government admits Daniel is not a threat to public safety, yet he was kept behind bars for six weeks and is being deprived of the ability to earn a living and support his family.”
“Daniel should have the benefits that the government promised him—the right to work and support his family and the right to not live in fear of arbitrary arrest,” Dettmer said. And it’s not just Ramirez Medina, but hundreds of thousands of other DACA recipients who signed up for the program in good faith, only to have the federal government rip the ground out from under them.
Last year, Reuters reported that during the time Ramirez Medina spent in detention, “ICE agents ‘repeatedly pressured’ him ‘to falsely admit’ gang affiliation’”—DACA recipients have to pass background checks in order to qualify for the program, which Ramirez Medina successfully did twice—with his attorney claiming that officials doctored a document in an attempt to frame him, calling it “one of the most serious examples of governmental misconduct that I have come across in my 40 years of practice”:
After Ramirez Medina's arrest during an immigration raid targeting a family member last week, ICE put out a statement claiming that Ramirez Medina was a "self-admitted gang member." Ramirez Medina's lawyers denied that their client ever said he was affiliated with a gang; they added that he had been pressured to say he was (but resisted) while in detention.
On Wednesday, the Seattle Times reported that the accusation of gang affiliation may have stemmed from a tattoo on Ramirez Medina's forearm with a nautical star and the name of his hometown.
According to e-mails obtained by The Stranger from a source at the city, ICE has declined to meet with Seattle Mayor Ed Murray to discuss the situation and share more information about Ramirez Medina's arrest.
Ramirez Medina was finally released after weeks in custody with the legal assistance of attorneys including Lawrence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard and former mentor to President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, and former Supreme Court Justice nominee Merrick Garland. But without DACA, Ramirez Medina is unable to work legally and do many of the things that U.S.-born Americans take for granted every single day, like driving.
This is the reality facing 800,000 young immigrants like him. Approximately 19,000 DACA recipients have lost their protections since Donald Trump announced the end of the program last year, and every day he continues to hold Dreamers hostage unless he gets his white supremacist immigration wish list, another 122 fall out of status. And while DACA could make all the difference for them, the ease with which Ramirez Medina lost his protections shows how fragile they are under this administration. He needs his DACA now. He also needs permanent protections in the form of the Dream Act now.
"I'm so happy to be reunited with my family today and can't wait to see my son," Ramirez Medina said at the time of his release from detention. "This has been a long and hard 46 days, but I'm so thankful for the support that I've gotten from everyone who helped me and for the opportunity to live in such an amazing country. I know that this isn't over, but I'm hopeful for the future, for me and for the hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers who love this country like I do."