ICE agents operating in New York City and Long Island have conducted scores of suspicionless stops and unlawful arrests of Latinos based solely on the color of their skin, a massive class action suit filed in Brooklyn federal court Thursday claims.
The lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society, the NYCLU, Make the Road NY, and others on behalf of eight New York residents claims they were stopped by ICE while doing everyday activities including driving their children to school, pumping gas and walking through a parking lot.
Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents grabbed the plaintiffs, took them into custody, and held them for days, sometimes weeks, until their immigration status could be confirmed and they were released, the lawsuit says.
“ICE is profiling and arresting Black and Brown New Yorkers based solely on their appearance. This is an egregious violation of their civil rights, that has caused fear and panic to ripple throughout New York’s immigrant communities,” Meghna Philip, director of the Special Litigation Unit at the Legal Aid Society, said Thursday. “This lawlessness must come to an end, and the federal government must be held accountable for its abuse of authority.”
One plaintiff, identified in the lawsuit as A.M.C., was grabbed by ICE on Feb. 24 as he entered his apartment building in Bushwick after returning home from work. He spent seven days in detention before he was released.
While he continues to commute back and forth to work six days a week, “due to his Latino ethnicity, A.M.C. fears being stopped, arrested, and detained again while going about his daily life,” the lawsuit says.
Five of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are from Long Island, where the Nassau County Police Department entered into an agreement with ICE to give agents broad authority to questions residents’ citizenship status and make arrests without a judicial warrant. Three of the five plaintiffs live in Suffolk County, where there is no such arrangement with ICE.
Two other plaintiffs live in the Buffalo area.
All claim they were racially profiled before their apprehension, violating a raft of federal laws and regulations. The lawsuit claims ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents continually violate laws requiring reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation before taking someone into custody.
Federal law demands that agents have probable cause of both an immigration violation and a likelihood of escape before making a warrantless arrest — something ICE agents often ignore, attorneys for the plaintiffs claim. Agents are flouting these laws in an effort to meet the Trump Administration’s immigration arrest quotas, according to the suit.
In the first six months of Trump’s current administration, immigration officials arrested 2,888 non-citizens in the greater New York City area, more than triple the amount arrested in the first six months of the previous administration, attorneys say.
“This policy of racial profiling is illegal and unconscionable,” New York State Attorney General Letitia James said about ICE’s tactics outlined in the lawsuit. “New Yorkers should be able to go about their daily lives without fear of being targeted by masked federal agents because of the color of their skin.”
An email to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security regarding the lawsuit was not immediately returned.