Campaign Action
Last year, Daniel Ramirez Medina was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during a raid targeting his father, despite having valid Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections. DACA recipients have to pass thorough background checks in order to enroll, yet immigration officials falsely accused him of gang affiliation and stripped him of his protections. He was released after six weeks and ended up winning his protections back, but now the federal government is targeting him yet again:
Federal officials restored Ramirez's DACA status last month after previously revoking it. Soon after that, however, officials notified him once again that they planned to cancel the protections, alleging that he had ties to a gang.
Ramirez has denied having gang ties, and a federal immigration judge has found the allegations to be unsubstantiated.
That’s putting it lightly. According to Ramirez Medina’s attorney Mark Rosenbaum, ICE officials doctored a document to make it look like the Seattle man was in a gang, with Rosenbaum calling it “one of the most serious examples of governmental misconduct that I have come across in my 40 years of practice”:
U.S. government lawyers, however, argued that while Ramirez had been told of the decision to revoke his DACA status, the government has not actually done so yet, meaning that there was no final action for Ramirez to challenge in court.
Martinez said that the government could not immediately cancel Ramirez's DACA status, but also requested a briefing with the lawyers in the case, the AP reported.
"We’re eager to have a trial,” Rosenbaum said. “We’re eager to question the Department of Homeland Security and ask them why they’ve said and why they continue to say that Daniel is a gang member. All we’re after is the truth, and we welcome a trial where the evidence is in front of a federal judge as to what basis the government had to try to disparage this young man and his family and try to destroy his future."
Add this to the pack of lies coming from ICE and the Trump administration. We know ICE lies about who they arrest and why they arrest them, and we certainly know Donald Trump lies when he says he wants to protect Dreamers. He’s the one who ended DACA, and he’s the one who has sabotaged more bipartisan plans to protect DACA recipients than you can count on one hand. And every day Congress delays on passing permanent protections, more immigrant youth, like Ramirez Medina, become at risk. From his op-ed last year:
I was arrested ... and brought to this center. Agents said that a tattoo on my arm means I’m in a gang. I got that tattoo when I was 18 to honor La Paz, Mexico, the city where I was born. Agents interrogated me for hours and insisted I was a gang member because I’m from the Central Valley. They are all gang members there, they told me. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I told them that I wasn’t.
They don’t even need to take my word for it — the government already knows that I’m not a gang member. Like all “dreamers,” I gave all of my personal information and fingerprints to the government to qualify for DACA. I’ve been checked against every state and federal database. They verified twice that I have no criminal history, was never affiliated with any gang and was not a threat to public safety. Despite that, I was treated as though my DACA status and my work authorization meant nothing.
But they are something. Immigrant youth have trusted the federal government with their information, in hopes that they can keep working, going to school, driving, and contributing to their communities. There was a promise here—if immigrant youth continued to follow the rules, they could continue in the program. Ramirez Medina kept his side of the promise, but the federal government broke their end of the bargain, and the Republican-led Congress is complicit in that broken promise by not passing the Dream Act to protect him and others from ongoing threats.
“Daniel represents what can happen,” said Luis Cortes, one of the attorneys representing Ramirez Medina. “I don’t think there’s any question that DACA is severely under attack.” Monserrat Padilla, an organizer with immigrant youth group United We Dream: “We’re hopeful communities will be able to respond like we’re doing in Daniel’s case with attorneys, with community members support. And we’re hopeful that Congress will wake up and realize that legislative solution needs to come today.”