A U.S. District Court judge signaled on Friday that she may release six women in ICE detention near Bakersfield.
It’s the latest move in attorneys’ attempts to fight back against the routine arrests of Bay Area asylum-seekers after they attend regular court hearings.
It is a rare case of San Francisco-based lawyers filing an asylum petition for immigrants in detention after being transferred from the Bay Area to remote facilities elsewhere in the state.
More than 2,000 people have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement across Northern California, Hawaii, and U.S. territories in the Pacific. Once immigrants are in detention, it is difficult for them to find a lawyer to file a petition for their release.
On late Friday, a federal judge, Jennifer L. Thurston with the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of California, signed an order stating that the petitioners “likely can demonstrate that their circumstances warrant the same relief” the court has offered to other immigrants in a similar situation: a temporary restraining order that releases them from detention.
Thurston gave the government a chance to respond to her order. She could order the women released as early as next week.
The petition late Friday was the first attempt at large-scale release of women out of the Mesa Verde detention center, near Bakersfield, California, said immigration attorney Jordan Wells.
Wells, along with colleague Victoria Petty of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, filed the habeas corpus petition on behalf of the women, arguing that the arrests and detentions violated due process rights.
In recent weeks, lawyers have had success in getting immigrants released from detention by filing habeas petitions, but mostly before those immigrants leave San Francisco.
On Friday, for instance, attorneys were able to release five of the six asylum-seekers Mission Local saw arrested in Judge Patrick O’Brien’s courtroom Thursday morning.
When asylum seekers are arrested in court, they are typically processed at an ICE field office two floors up from the immigration court at 630 Sansome St. They are held there for hours or a few days, until ICE finds a bed for them in a longer-term detention facility. There are no such facilities in the Bay Area.
Generally, habeas petitions had to be filed based on a person’s current location, so an arrest sets off a rush for attorneys to figure out who was taken and file a petition before they are transferred out of 630 Sansome St.
The overwhelming majority of people arrested following court hearings tracked by Mission Local do not have a lawyer, and often require a lawyer to file the petition for them pro bono.
If they are transferred, San Francisco-based lawyers have to refile the petition in the defendant’s new location.
If a lawyer cannot pinpoint the detainee’s location, or the petition is filed too late, that person slips through the cracks.
For example, one of the six women included in this habeas corpus petition by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights was arrested alongside two others from the same courtroom on Aug. 1.
One of those three, a 20-year-old asylum seeker from Colombia, was released on a habeas corpus petition within days, because he had friends with him in court who immediately contacted Wells. The other two are still in detention in facilities in California and Louisiana.
“It reflects the reality,” Wells wrote, “that the legal services community doesn’t have the resources and real-time info to keep pace with ICE’s campaign of dragnet arrests.”
Three of the six women included in the petition late Friday were arrested following administrative hearings in their asylum cases at San Francisco immigration court, at either 630 Sansome St. or 100 Montgomery St.
Mission Local was in court and witnessed two of the arrests on July 18 and Aug. 1. Another woman, a San Francisco resident, was arrested on June 30.
The other three women were arrested at check-ins with ICE or at their homes, according to the habeas corpus petition, filed by Wells and Petty on behalf of the six women. Two of them live outside of the San Francisco Bay Area: in Fresno and Eugene, Oregon, according to the petition.
I’m glad to see the US government finally attempting to enforce our own immigration laws. Illegal immigrants take jobs and housing from people who are here legally.
This judge is part of the problem, not the solution.
Nevermind that Elon came into the country via Visa fraud, Melania as well?
Or are the laws only important when we enforce them on other people, Belmont GOP?
The farmers in California, lot of them voted for orange wanna be dictator who never went to the army, are dealing with a shortage of workers..as a result lots of crops are rotting but they have not seen a single maga white dude applying for a job to pick them up..as a result maga white dudes will be complaining that prices for groceries are going up..