Critics: ICE arrests are retaliation

Actions vs. top activists worry immigrant groups

As immigration enforcement intensifies under the Trump administration, immigrant-rights activists increasingly are taking to the streets, staging protests, demonstrations, and news conferences.

Now, critics say, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is targeting activists to silence them.

They point to high-profile activists who have been arrested, detained or deported by ICE since Trump took office 15 months ago.

ICE officials say the agency does not target or retaliate against activists.

Several of the immigrant-rights activists recently arrested by ICE had final orders of removal, or prior criminal convictions, making it difficult to determine whether they were arrested for their activism or because they fall under the Trump administration’s tougher deportation policies, which include taking action against undocumented immigrants previously allowed to stay in the country under supervision orders.

Others activists recently arrested,

however, had no prior interaction with ICE.

A Tucson woman detained by ICE is the most recent example of the agency retaliating against immigrants for their activism, advocates say.

Alejandra Pablos, an immigrant and women’s reproductive-rights activist, was arrested in January while taking part in an anti-ICE rally outside Department of Homeland Security offices in Richmond, Virginia. Her supporters say no other protesters were arrested that day, suggesting DHS officers targeted her.

Two months later, in March, Pablos was taken into custody when she went to the ICE offices in Tucson for her regular check-in.

In a video posted on YouTube, apparently recorded in anticipation of ICE taking her into custody, Pablos accused the agency of retaliating against her for her activism. “They are trying to really separate me and tear our movement apart and tear our community apart,” Pablos says in the video.

Pablos, who also works as field coordinator for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health in Washington, D.C., is being held at an immigration detention center in Eloy. ICE officials say she was taken into custody for violating terms of her order of supervision when she was arrested. ICE noted that her criminal history includes two convictions for driving under the influence in 2009 and 2012.

“An immigration judge with the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review will determine whether Ms. Pablos has a legal basis to remain in the United States,” ICE officials said in a written statement.

Her immigration lawyer, Jesse Evans-Schroeder, is fighting to have Pablos released on bond. She said Pablos had been checking in with ICE regularly while battling her deportation case stemming from the DUI convictions.

She said Pablos knew there was a chance she would be taken into custody given her activism arrest in January.

“There is no appearance of retaliation for her activism,” Evans-Schroeder said. “This is par for the course if you have an arrest while you are released on bond. They have the discretion to arrest you. It doesn’t always happen but they have the authority to do that.”

But Pablos’ supporters believe the agency is trying to silence her. An online petition calling for ICE to release Pablos has received more than 23,500 signatures, according to the website of Mijente, a national Latino organizing group.

“Alejandra is a very well-known activist with deep ties to her community and is not a flight risk. The fact is that their only reason to re-detain her is for an arrest that came out of a protest, and really shows that people are targeted for these arrests,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, a field director with Mijente.

Pablos’ arrest comes after several advocacy groups filed a lawsuit in February in federal court in New York accusing ICE of targeting immigrant-rights groups for speaking out against the Trump administration’s immigrationenforcement actions.

Under the Trump administration, “something has changed,” the lawsuit states. “Federal immigration authorities have specifically targeted prominent and outspoken immigrant-rights activists across the country on the basis of their speech and political advocacy on behalf of immigrants’ rights and social justice.

“These activists have been surveilled, intimidated, harassed, and detained, their homes have been raided, many have been plucked off the street in broad daylight, and some have even been deported.”

The lawsuit was filed after ICE in January detained Ravi Ragbir, a prominent New York City immigrant-rights activist, when he reported to ICE for a routine check-in and was instead taken into custody.

Ragbir, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, had been checking in regularly with ICE since 2011 while fighting to remain in the country following a 2000 felony conviction for wire fraud. After serving 21⁄2 years in prison, he was transferred to immigration. ICE granted Ragbir a stay of removal in 2011 while he sought to have his deportation case reopened and his legal residency restored through a petition filed by his U.S. citizen wife, according to a summary of his case compiled by his lawyers.

As executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition, an immigrantrights organization, Ragbir spearheaded weekly “Jericho Walks” around the Federal Plaza in Manhattan protesting ICE detentions and deportations.

He “has grown more and more famous around the New York region and also nationally” because of his activism, said Jessica Rofé, immigrant-rights fellow at the New York University Law School Immigrant Rights Clinic.

She believes Ragbir was “abruptly arrested” and detained Jan. 11 during a check-in with ICE because of his activism, Rofé said. After his arrest, protesters chanting “Ravi, Ravi, Ravi,” flooded the streets outside ICE’s offices in Manhattan, and scuffled with police.

ICE flew Ragbir to Miami and he was detained at the Krome Detention Center, “presumably so he could be quickly deported,” Rofé said.

“Suffice it to say, given the clear deviations from normal procedu res, the abrupt arrest, the abrupt detention, the abru pt flight to Miami, all of these things su ggest that these deviations were retaliatory,” Rofé said. “So we believe that they were retaliating specifically against Ravi becau se of his vocal opposition to a lot of the immigration law and policy currently in existence.”

Two weeks after Ragbir was detained, a federal judge ordered his immediate release, and blasted ICE for su bjecting Ragbir to treatment “we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have long lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home and work. And sent away,” according to the New York Times.

Matthew Albence, ICE’s executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations, refuted in a written statement allegations that the agency is retaliating against immigrantrights activists.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not target unlawfully present aliens for arrest based on advocacy positions they hold or in retaliation for critical comments they make,” the statement said. “Any suggestion to the contrary is irresponsible, speculative and inaccurate.”

Albence said the agency’s priority is people who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security, but he pointed out that “ICE leadership has made clear” that the agency will now go after all immigration violators.

“All those in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and — if found removable by final order — removal from the United States,” the statement said.

The lawsuit spurred by Ragbir’s arrest lists more than half a dozen examples of immigrant-rights activists the suit claims were targeted by ICE:

Daniela Vargas, a 22-year old activist from Argentina, was detained by ICE in March 2017 after leaving a news conference in Jackson, Mississippi, where she spoke in support of fellow dreamers protected from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Jose Enrique Balcazar Sanchez and Zully Victoria Palacios Rodriguez, immigrant organizers with Migrant Justice in Vermont were arrested by ICE the same month while advocating for better working conditions in the dairy industry.

Immigrant dairy-farm workers Yesenia Hernandez-Ramos and Esau PecheVentura were arrested by the Border Patrol in June and taken into custody by ICE after participating in a Migrant Justice march to a Ben & Jerry’s factory to call for better pay and living conditions for dairy-farm workers.

In December, ICE began deportation proceedings against Maru Mora Villalpando, a Mexican-born immigrantrights activist in Seattle who has been an outspoken critic of a privately run immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington. She came out publicly in 2014 as being in the country illegally after taking part in a protest blocking streets to the detention center and organizing a hunger strike among detained immigrant.

“That is what we do, we work people detained, we expose these detention conditions and...we have seen the retaliation they suffer...because they are whistleblowers,” Villalpando told the USA TODAY NETWORK. “And now what we see is that retaliation is going from the inside of the detention center to the outside. Now they are coming after us.”

Eliseo Jurado-Fernandez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was arrested by ICE after his undocumented wife took sanctuary in a church in Colorado while battling her own deportation by ICE to Peru.

Amer Othman Adi, a 57-year-old Cleveland businessman, was taken into custody and deported to Jordan by ICE in January days after holding a press conference at his Cleveland-area deli.

Othman had been living in the U.S. for nearly four decades, was married to a U.S. citizen, and had no criminal history his lawyer, David Leopold, told the USA TODAY NETWORK. He had lost his green card after his first wife accused him of marriage fraud but ICE had allowed him to remain free under an order of supervision while he pursued another green card through his new wife.

In September, however, ICE placed a GPS monitoring device on his ankle and told him he had to leave the country by Jan. 7, Leopold said. Days before he was set to leave, Othman held a news conference at his deli, “not to badger ICE” but to “say goodbye” to the community, Leopold said.

ICE then called Othman and told him he didn’t have to leave, Leopold said. Othman was instructed instead to check in with ICE a week later, when he was taken into custody, held in a federal immigration detention center, and then suddenly deported to Jordan. At the time, a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, asking Congress to grant Othman legal status was pending in the House, Leopold said.

“There is no other reason than this was retribution for speaking out,” Leopold said of Othman’s deportation. “It was one of the ugliest moves that I have ever seen ICE make . ... It was really, in my view, a way to dehumanize and humiliate this man in front of his community before they threw him out of the country. It’s unconscionable when you think about the fact that he had bought his ticket. He was leaving.”

Leopold said he has noticed a sharp shift in the way ICE treats immigrants under the Trump administration. He said several of his clients have been warned by ICE that “if they talked to the media it was going to make things worse.”

“I think ICE under Trump has become an extremely repressive agency,” Leopold said. “You’ve got this agency that was rogue before, but now it’s much more so because they have a president who is willing to let them treat immigrants like animals and that is exactly what they are doing.”