by Thomas Breen
National Immigration Law Center President Kica Matos: “Today, one of the most ordinary acts of American life — getting on a plane — has become a trap, even for people following the process.”
“My call is to every attorney,” Glenn Formica said at City Hall on Monday. “I don’t care if you do real estate. I don’t care if you do elder law. You need to step up now. You hold the line here or there’s no more line.”
Formica issued that plea at a press conference decrying “unlawful detentions” and arrests made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — including, recently, at Tweed New Haven Airport.
Formica is one of 10 staff and volunteer attorneys at The American Immigrant Law Clinic, a New Haven-based nonprofit affiliated with Connecticut Students for a Dream. He was one of a handful of speakers at a Monday morning presser slamming the Trump administration for repeatedly breaking the law in how it handles immigration enforcement.
The event took place as ICE has made at least two arrests of passengers at Tweed in recent weeks, including of a 19-year-old Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) basketball player named Deng Deng. Formica was Deng’s attorney in his federal habeas case; a U.S. judge ultimately released Deng after criticizing the federal government’s “mismanagement” of his detention.
Speakers at Monday’s press conference called out ICE for depriving detainees of their due process rights and for delaying access to an attorney and a prompt bond hearing.
“What ICE is doing should outrage every American because it’s violating the law,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said.
“Today, one of the most ordinary acts of American life — getting on a plane — has become a trap, even for people following the process,” said National Immigration Law Center President Kica Matos.
Matos called on the federal government to “end the secret pipeline” of data sharing between the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and ICE. She called for ICE to stop the “appalling practice of stopping people at airports.” She pressed Avports and the Tweed New Haven Airport Authority “to stop being complicit with ICE.” And she said that, “finally, ICE needs to get out. They need to get out of our city. And they need to get out of our state.”
Formica used his time at the mic in part to detail the various legal and moral outrages of how ICE makes arrests and handles detainees.
He said that ICE is grabbing people with “no criminal record or very minor criminal offenses” at courthouses and, now, at airports. Once ICE takes people into custody, he said, they typically provide detainees with a phone call, but “they don’t get access to a lawyer.” ICE asks them to sign a “voluntary departure” even if they have available relief, such as an asylum claim, to stay in this country. They also promise detainees money if they self-deport but then sometimes “the money … never shows up.”
“It’s just deceit,” Formica said. “It’s not what we would expect from the federal government.”
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article. The New York Times recently reported that, in July, a majority of the immigrants arrested by ICE had not been charged or convicted of a crime.
Formica also said that ICE’s detainees would be “better housed and better treated” if they had been arrested or even convicted of a serious crime. “God bless us if they were actually treated as criminals, because they would have the right to a prompt bond hearing.”
Instead, ICE detainees often find themselves “sleeping on cement floors with foil blankets for days. Broken toilets, dirty water. They have to pay for phone calls. This isn’t locked up abroad. This is locked up at home.”
Soon thereafter, Formica issued his plea to fellow attorneys to join the fight and help The American Immigrant Law Clinic, which focuses on filing habeas lawsuits and freeing people newly arrested and detaind by ICE.
“I’ve been an attorney for almost 30 years,” Formica said. “Thirty years ago I took an oath to defend the Constitution.”
That’s what all lawyers need to do now in pushing back against ICE’s lawlessness.
“The fight is now for attorneys,” he said. “It’s not for the president. He has abandoned us.” And Congress “does not seem to be fighting for us either.”
“The fight is for lawyers. We need to fight this. If you’re a criminal defense lawyer, I need to see your face, because everything that is happening right now violates the 4th Amendment. You know this. You know this. This is your fight.”
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal: “Americans should be ashamed to have an agency of government operating unlawfully [and] out of control.”