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This is now as common as breathing. ICE does stuff. Arrested people invoke their rights. ICE shows up in court. The court expresses its anger at ICE’s tactics and lies.
Thousands of habeas cases filed by migrants have ended with the courts siding with the arrested migrants. It’s actually more than 10,000 at this point, but the only thing the administration counts is the arrests.
The addition of poorly trained ICE officers to a blend of federal agencies all focused on making chief advisor/ghoul Stephen Miller’s racist fantasies a reality has resulted in the routine violation of rights, as well as the actual murders of American citizens.
So far, we’ve mostly heard angry words from federal judges all over the nation. That may change eventually since the government clearly can’t be deterred by being told it’s in the wrong pretty much all the fucking time. There are only words here too, unfortunately. Hopefully, the anger expressed here will be converted into meaningful sanctions against ICE and the DOJ, but until then we will have to satisfy ourselves with knowing all of this is now part of the public record.
Trump did manage to stack the most important court in the land — something that has paid off more often than not during his second term as president. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that most of his court appointees are more interested in serving the law, rather than serving a guy who thinks he was elected king.
And so it goes here in New York — one of Trump’s favorite targets due to its resistance to his malignant strain of MAGA. The streets have been swarmed by federal officers almost constantly since early last year. That has resulted in the expected jump in arrests and detainments. Not pictured: any respect for long-respected due process rights or even the barest minimum of Fourth Amendment adherence.
That’s what has prompted the latest round of excoriation by a federal court, as the New York Times reports:
A federal judge in New York reprimanded the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on Monday, accusing its officers of lying, lacking proper training and fabricating records to cover up illegal arrests.
[…]
Judge Brown wrote that immigration agents involved in the arrests had given “inconsistent, false and misleading testimony” in court, and said that they had probably perjured themselves. He found that the officers were inexperienced, possessed little understanding of the law and used “false testimony to conceal these failings.”
What’s detailed in the order [PDF] issued by Trump appointee Gary Brown is the sort of corrupt cop shit we always hoped would mostly be relegated to James Ellroy novels and David Simon series. But what’s been exposed by Trump’s anti-migrant animosity is an agency that firmly believes it can arrest whoever it wants and fix it in post — something greatly encouraged by the Supreme Court’s “Kavanaugh stop” non-ruling.
This only deals with one of several plaintiffs making similar arguments about ICE’s arrests. But its telling nonetheless.
Agents allegedly arrested petitioner based on a physical description and photograph of one target. Yet the description disproves the match: the target was five inches shorter and 80 pounds lighter than the petitioner. As to the photograph, the team leader acknowledged upon cross-examination that “it’s very easy to see they’re two different people.” Trying to legitimize petitioner’s arrest, ICE issued a post-hoc sworn administrative warrant containing false information and later issued a Notice to Appear. At the hearing, the officers proffered inconsistent, false and misleading testimony.
The result is troubling: compelling evidence here belies the ICE agents’ reflexive invocation of misidentification as an excuse for erroneous arrests. Particularly problematic in this case, the evidence suggests that ICE attempted to support their unsupported misidentification argument through false or misleading documentation and testimony. The claims of misidentification here prove baseless, the arrests were procedurally deficient and legally invalid, and ICE agents falsified official records trying to conceal their illegal actions, which included significant injury to a U.S. citizen.
Two things should be noted, remembered, and retained as ammunition to use against this administration. First, ICE agents just arrested a guy and then worked backwards to justify the arrest, even though the person they arrested didn’t resemble anything in the narrative ICE hastily erected post-arrest. Second, this whole chain of injustices was inflicted on an actual US citizen — you know, the exact people Trump believes are inherently better than anyone else.
Here’s the rough equivalence a thousand words disputing ICE’s lies and deflection as officers, supervisors, and government lawyers attempted to salvage something from this illegal arrest that was illegal when it involved a purported migrant, but is at least doubly so when it ended with ICE officers tossing a US citizen in jail.
Here’s ICE (and the court notes that some of the officers had almost zero experience [thanks Trump!]) pretending a 5’7″, 110-lb. person is indistinguishable from the purported “target” of the puportedly “targeted” arrest — someone who weighed in at 180 lbs. (at least!) and stood six feet tall.
ICE tried to lie its way out of this. But surveillance video provided by a local business showed ICE officers (with weapons drawn) ambushing Concepcion as he peacefully walked to a barber shop. Conception never saw the officers until they threw him to the ground violently, which immediately disproves the claim that the target of the arrest was trying to avoid apprehension.
It also disproves nearly everything ICE Team Leader John Katepodis stated in court and on his paperwork as he helped his officers work backwards from an unjustified arrest.
First, he states that he “incorrectly testified” regarding what database information was accessible onsite and states that the EARM system “was available to me and my team on our cellphones during the surveillance,” which included the “height, weight and build” of the two targets. Thus, contrary to the testimony he offered at the hearing, Katepodis now claims that the information about “height, weight and build” was available to his team during the operation.
Katepodis further attempts to alter his sworn testimony that he was unaware of whether his supervisor had issued the warrant at the time of the arrest, by now stating that “it was [his] understanding that an I-200 warrant of arrest was issued” prior to the arrest. Again, this contradicts his testimony at the hearing, during which Katepodis testified that his supervisor told him “he was going to issue the I 200,” acknowledged that he “didn’t have the warrant yet” and had been “told that an I 200 was going to be issued.”
Finally, Katepodis tries to explain his apparent falsification of the warrant by certifying it was served by him in the Bronx, when service was made by someone else in Manhattan. Katepodis suggests that it “was my understanding that the certificate of service for the I-200 required the location of the arrest and where Petitioner was locatedat the time the I-200 was issued.” This is largely irrelevant, as it is clear from the testimony that Katepodis had no idea when or whether the administrative arrest warrant was issued.
The ICE Team Leader calls this “incorrect” testimony. Most normal people — including some judges — call this “perjury.” It’s clear from the record that no arrest warrant supporting the arrest of Concepcion existed (and how could it?) before ICE officers arrested him. The document claiming to support this arrest was created after ICE had already arrested the wrong person.
[T]he Court notes that subsequent to petitioner’s detention, ICE agents prepared a substantially false administrative warrant in an attempt to rationalize their actions. The warrant purports to establish “probable cause to believe that [Almonte] is removable from the United States . . . based upon biometric confirmation of the subject’s identity and a records check of federal databases that affirmatively indicate . . . that the subject . . . lacks immigration status.” DE 7-1. The claim that database queries checks could “positively identify” petitioner appears spurious as, without any immigration record, petitioner would not appear in any ICE database from which he could be positively identified.
Unfortunately, there are no sanctions to be had here. Yet. The court is giving ICE one more chance to explain itself before it moves forward with sanctions or any further investigation of its own. I would assume sanctions of some sort will be the end result here, because every time ICE has been given a chance to explain its actions, it just ends up digging a bigger hole.
If this does actually result in ICE officers and DOJ lawyers being bench-slapped, I would absolutely expect Trump to start mouthing off about “activist” judges, even though the one he’s complaining about is one he hand-picked for the job. If nothing else, this should prove Trump isn’t quite the wheeler-dealer he makes himself out to be. He’s a terrible judge of character (so to speak). And you know what they say about that: if you can’t immediately spot the sucker in the room, you’re the sucker.
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