Slate had a new piece yesterday about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents openly lying and trying to coerce a false confession out of a DACA protected Dreamer.
Last year, ICE agents tried to strip Daniel Ramirez Medina of his DACA status by claiming he was “gang affiliated” due to a tattoo of his birthplace.
The facts of Ramirez’s case are extremely disturbing. In February 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump unleashed immigration agents to amp up arrests and deportations, ICE agents went to Ramirez’s father’s house in Seattle to arrest him. (The father is undocumented, and brought Ramirez to the U.S. illegally as a child.) While there, they encountered Ramirez and asked him whether he was “legally here.” He responded that he was—a truthful statement given his DACA status, which he had renewed the previous May. Yet ICE officers detained him anyway. They took him to a processing center, where, once again, he told them that he had work permit.
“It doesn’t matter,” an agent responded, “because you weren’t born in this country.”
ICE sent him to a detention center, stripped him of his work permit, fingerprinted him, booked him, and started proceedings to have him deported. It was also at this time that ICE agents tried to have him stripped of his DACA status because he was an “egregious public safety concern” due to their labeling him as gang-affiliated. This seems to be ICE agents favorite bugaboo; find someone who’s a Dreamer, claim this person in “gang-affiliated”, and lock them up.
Two different immigration judges found no indication that Ramirez was gang affiliated or a threat to public safety. Martin Flores, a gang expert who has consulted in more than 700 cases, testified that he had “never seen a gang member with a similar tattoo nor would [he] attribute this tattoo to have any gang-related meaning.” Another gang expert, Edwina Barvosa, declared that there is “no apparent evidence that [Ramirez] has ever been a gang member himself.” Carlos García, a Mexican researcher who has studied gangs extensively, stated that “this tattoo does not show any gang affiliation.” But ICE still insisted that Ramirez was a gang member, and thus eligible for deportation.
Mr. Ramirez sued ICE. The ICE agents continued to lie in court, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary of all of their claims. The Judge, U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez, a George W Bush appointee, was having none of this.
Not only did this judge openly accuse ICE of lying in court, he tore into them:
“conclusory findings,” he wrote, have “been contradicted by experts and other evidence.” The government “produced no evidence” to contradict multiple experts’ testimony discrediting ICE’s bizarre interpretation of Ramirez’s tattoo. And its claims are “completely contradictory to the government’s own previous findings after extensive background checks that were meant to uncover evidence of ‘known or suspected gang association.’ ”
“Most troubling to the Court,” Martinez continued, “is the continued assertion that Mr. Ramirez is gang-affiliated, despite providing no evidence specific to Mr. Ramirez to the Immigration Court in connection with his administrative proceedings, and offering no evidence to this Court to support its assertions four months later.”
If you’ll permit one more quote from the article, it really sums up the judge’s ruling:
Martinez concluded that ICE had violated Ramirez’s rights by depriving him of “his constitutionally protected liberty and property interests without due process of law.” The judge also found that ICE had violated federal law by stripping Ramirez of his DACA status in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner without any “rational explanation for its decision.” Accordingly, he barred the government from terminating Ramirez’s DACA benefits, shielding his right to continue living and working in the U.S. And he prohibited the government from “asserting, adopting, or relying in any proceedings on any statement or record … purporting to allege or establish that Mr. Ramirez is a gang member, gang affiliated, or a threat to public safety.”
As far as I can see in all this, the only people who are “gang-affiliated” are the ICE agents perpetrating this horrid crime on a human being. One can only hope these agents were punished in a manner befitting their crime.