By Dietrich Knauth
Feb 12 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ensure that detainees have access to their attorneys in Minnesota, after finding that the agency had blocked thousands of people from seeing their lawyers during a recent enforcement surge.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, said ICE’s practices during the recent Operation Metro Surge, including a policy of quickly moving detainees out of Minnesota and depriving them of phone calls, “all but extinguish a detainee’s access to counsel.”
Brasel made the initial ruling in a class action lawsuit that was filed on behalf of detainees on January 27 and her order will remain in place for 14 days while the proceedings play out.
The court order requires the government to stop rapidly transferring detainees out of the state and to allow attorney-client visits and private phone calls between detainees and their lawyers.
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said detainees have access to phones that they can use to contact their families and lawyers and denied that there was any "overcrowding" at the Minneapolis federal building where detainees are processed.
Democracy Forward, a nonprofit that filed the lawsuit on behalf of detainees, said that the right to a lawyer is not "optional" in the U.S.
"DHS has been detaining people in a building never meant for long-term custody, shackling them, secretly transferring them out of state and blocking access to counsel and oversight in a deliberate effort to evade accountability," Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman said in a statement.
ICE did not dispute that detainees had a constitutional right to counsel and it said it does not have a policy of preventing detainees from seeing their lawyers, according to the ruling. But in practice, it provided conditions that isolated thousands of people from their attorneys, Brasel said.
The plaintiffs, who are noncitizen detainees, had provided substantial and specific evidence about their detention conditions, which contradicted ICE’s “threadbare” explanations of its policies and its protestations that it did not have enough resources to provide detainees with access to their lawyers, the judge found.
“Defendants allocated substantial resources to sending thousands of agents to Minnesota, detaining thousands of people and housing them in their facilities,” Brasel said in her ruling. “Defendants cannot suddenly lack resources when it comes to protecting detainees’ constitutional rights.”
Most detainees are initially held at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, but many are immediately transferred out of state, without notice, with no way for attorneys to contact them, according to the ruling.
Detainees are sometimes moved so quickly and frequently that ICE loses track of where they are, the judge found.
Most detainees are provided some phone access, but that falls short of providing adequate legal representation, Brasel's ruling said.
ICE does not always provide the name or phone number of a lawyer when detainees ask and phone calls often take place in a public area where ICE personnel and other detainees can listen in, according to the ruling.
One detainee in the lawsuit, a 20-year-old asylum seeker with a government-issued work permit, was sent to a detention center where ICE provided two flip phones to be shared among 72 detainees in a single holding cell, according to the court ruling. The detainees each had no more than two minutes for a call, it said.
The 20-year-old detainee was released after 18 days in detention, despite a court order requiring his release after five days. In the meantime, he was transferred first to Texas and then to New Mexico before being returned to Minnesota; ICE officers never told him why he was detained or why he was released, according to the ruling.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)
