Activist Entitled to ‘Freedom to Say Goodbye,’ Judge Rules

NEW YORK — In an impassioned rebuke of the Trump administration’s immigration practices, a U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan on Monday ordered the immediate release of immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir, calling his abrupt detention on Jan. 11 unconstitutional and cruel.

Ragbir, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who has been ordered to leave the country by immigration officials, should have been entitled to “the freedom to say goodbye,” as Judge Katherine B. Forrest, of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, put it in her opinion.

“It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have long lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home and work. And sent away," Forrest said, reading from the written order she delivered soon after oral arguments.

“We are not that country; and woe be the day that we become that country under a fiction that laws allow it.”

Thunderous cheers and clapping erupted in the 23rd floor courtroom packed to overflow capacity with clergy and members of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City, the immigrant rights organization where Ragbir is the executive director. He was expected to be released Monday night from the Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, New York, and will continue to fight his deportation on several fronts.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency issued a stinging response, in which it called Ragbir “an aggravated felon” in reference to his wire fraud conviction in 2000. It said it was “actively exploring” an appeal.

“The agency is deeply disturbed by the harmful personal attacks some Congress members have leveled against career law enforcement personnel, whose sworn duty is enforcing laws enacted by Congress itself,” the statement read.

“The agency is similarly concerned with the tone of the district court’s decision, which equates the difficult work ICE professionals do every day to enforce our immigration laws with ‘treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust.’”

Federal prosecutors asked Forrest, who was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2011, to keep Ragbir in detention. Forrest rejected the request.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell Law School, called the decision “groundbreaking.” He said, “It holds that the Constitution requires the government to give people subject to a final deportation order time to arrange their affairs.”

But Yale-Loehr cautioned: “Today’s decision was long on rhetoric and short on careful legal analysis. I worry that a higher court may reverse.”

The judge acknowledged that the government’s labyrinthine statutes allowed for the detention of people with what are known as final orders of removal, meaning that they have no further appeals in the immigration courts and may be deported. But that did not mean that the government could deny due process, she said.

“Taking such a man, and there are many such men and women like him, and subjecting him to what is rightfully understood as no different or better than penal detention, is certainly cruel,” Forrest said. “The Constitution commands better.”

Ragbir came to the United States in 1991 from Trinidad and Tobago. He had been a lawful permanent resident when he was convicted of wire fraud in 2000. After he served his sentence, Ragbir was ordered deported in 2006 and detained by immigration officials, then released on an order of supervision while his case moved through the immigration courts.

In 2011, the New York field office of the ICE granted him a stay of removal, allowing him to remain in the country. He was given several extensions of the stay, the last set to expire on Jan. 19. But ICE decided to detain him eight days early, at a Jan. 11 check-in.

Federal prosecutors argued they did so because ICE had obtained travel documents from Trinidad. The agency flew him to a detention facility in Miami without initially notifying his lawyer and wife; the court later ordered him back to the New York area.

Because Ragbir was not a flight risk or a danger to the community, his lawyers argued that he should not have been detained.

The decision from the district court comes after several nationally prominent immigrant activists were detained in recent weeks. Ragbir’s legal team from New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, led by Alina Das, argued that officials from ICE detained him in order to silence and punish him.

They said that Scott Mechkowski, the assistant field director of ICE who ordered him deported, had resented Ragbir for his activism against the agency.

During oral arguments, Jeremy Cutting, a legal intern for Das, said that Mechkowski had at one point referred to the Jan. 11 check-in as “D-Day.” After Ragbir was detained and taken away in an ambulance, it turned into a showdown; 18 people, including two New York City Council members, were arrested during protests outside the federal building.

Brandon Waterman, a lawyer for the government, said that claims that government was targeting Ragbir were “pure speculation,” adding, “we have no information to support that.”

Das said that Ragbir has a separate lawsuit pending in New Jersey challenging his original criminal conviction. A judge there has issued a temporary stay of deportation so that the court can hear the case, and the next hearing is on Feb. 9.

Amy Gottlieb, Ragbir’s wife, called Forrest’s decision gratifying. “We’ve all seen that our immigration system is not treating people fairly,” she said. “And the judge saw that and called it out.”

Before the decision, Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., had invited Gottlieb to be her guest at the State of the Union on Tuesday. Gottlieb said that she wanted her husband to accompany her to Washington.