A Judge Ordered ICE Agents To Stop Retaliating Against an Ohio Videographer. ICE Moved the Agents Out of Town.

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) last Friday barring federal immigration officers from retaliating against a Springfield, Ohio, man for recording them. But the government says the man’s First Amendment lawsuit should be tossed because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already moved most of the officers accused of trying to intimidate him out of town.

Sean Moorman filed a lawsuit last week alleging that federal immigration officers launched an escalating intimidation campaign against him for his activity recording and monitoring ICE operations in Springfield, which has become a target of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign because of its large number of Haitian immigrants.

Moorman, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio, is seeking the names of seven immigration officers listed as defendants in his suit. However, in court filings, ICE says it has already transferred six of those seven defendant officers out of Springfield.

The government argues this means Moorman no longer has standing to pursue his case. “With six of those seven agents no longer working in the Springfield, Ohio area, Plaintiff falls far short of his burden to demonstrate that additional harm is ‘certainly impending,'” Justice Department attorneys wrote in a Wednesday court brief asking the judge presiding over the case to vacate the TRO.

The government also argues that Moorman should not be allowed to discover the identities of those officers because it would risk “exposing those officers to serious harm.”

The ACLU of Ohio says the government is trying to shield the officers from accountability, not retaliation.

“Sean Moorman has been subjected to an escalating campaign of intimidation by masked and anonymous ICE officers for exercising his First Amendment right to record their actions in public,” David Carey, managing legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, said in a statement to Reason. “It is deeply disappointing to see that the government’s response is to try to help these officers evade accountability in court, by shuffling them to other cities and by continuing to shield their identities.”

Moorman volunteered to become an ICE watcher in Springfield, but according to his lawsuit, within days of beginning to follow and record officers, ICE vehicles began tailing him as he drove, swerving toward him as if to ram him, aggressively boxing him in, and driving slowly past his house while photographing it.

Moorman’s lawsuit echoes numerous other cases of alleged First Amendment retaliation by immigration officers around the country. The ACLU of Tennessee filed a class-action lawsuit in May against a federal law enforcement task force in Memphis for harassing legal observers.

The Department of Homeland Security and immigration officers have repeatedly accused videographers and legal observers of obstruction of justice and “doxxing,” but civil liberties advocates say the DHS is flat wrong about the law: Every federal appeals court that has considered the issue—nine so far—has firmly upheld the right to record law enforcement in public.

U.S. District Judge Michael J. Newman issued an order last Friday granting Moorman’s request for a temporary restraining order. Newman’s TRO enjoins all ICE officers in Springfield for the next two weeks “from engaging in any further threatening, intimidating, and retaliatory action against Moorman without a legitimate law enforcement purpose as a consequence of his continued exercise of his First Amendment rights.”

Newman found that there was a hard-to-ignore proximity between Moorman recording ICE officers and their ensuing behavior.

“Almost every interaction Moorman had with ICE officers was promptly followed by a retaliatory act,” Newman wrote in his order. “Each time Moorman filmed the officers, they quickly traveled to his home, shouted at him, attempted to ram his vehicle, or filmed him.”

Newman also noted that the government hadn’t contested Moorman’s claims that he had done nothing but peacefully and lawfully record ICE officers. Newman wrote in a footnote that an assistant U.S. attorney who appeared at a September 2 hearing “could not offer a single reason to explain Defendants’ conduct.”

In the government’s brief asking Newman to vacate his TRO, it describes the officers’ alleged retaliatory acts as “a smattering of fluid, brief actions by individual officers over a handful of days in recent weeks,” none of which adversely impacted Moorman or chilled his First Amendment rights.

“Even if the Court were to believe isolated incidents of retaliatory action occurred against Plaintiff, there is no evidence or indication that the agency or its leadership directed, encouraged, coordinated, or was even aware of retaliatory actions against Plaintiff or others,” the brief continues. “To the contrary, the evidence in this action shows that ICE maintains a policy prohibiting unlawful retaliation or harassment.”

The government brief argues Newman’s TRO is unworkable, too vague, and violates the separation of powers.