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Litigation challenging ICE's 'deceptive' police impersonation tactic granted class action status [1]

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Date: 2023-02-15  

“These tactics include where ICE conducts an immigration enforcement operation at a home without proper identification by agents or without a warrant or valid consent,” organizations said. ICE agents know perfectly well they’re not allowed to enter a home unless they have a signed judicial warrant, so they will often misrepresent themselves or say they’re looking for a friend or relative in order to lure someone outside. In just one example reported by The Los Angeles Times in 2017, an agent identified himself as police numerous times within a matter of moments to one targeted immigrant. “Good morning, how you doing? I’m a police officer. We’re doing an investigation,” the agent said.

“Evidence shows that these practices are widespread and have been endorsed by high-ranking officials in the agency,” said the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, the UC Irvine School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic, and the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, which sued on behalf of the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). “In all the alleged incidents, ICE officers made some sort of misrepresentation in order to induce consent to enter an individual’s home or to induce them to step outside,” court documents said. Following class certification this month, the suit now affects residents in the Southern California region “who have been or are at risk of being subjected to the policies and practices challenged in the lawsuit,” the organizations said.

While that would be a significant step toward justice should the lawsuit succeed, the practice would still remain a scourge nationally if it’s not eliminated entirely (which the Biden administration certainly could do). Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House have previously introduced legislation that would make it illegal for ICE agents (as well as agents with Customs and Border Protection) to pretend to be police, but it never advanced.

“Advocates warn that ICE agents, by displaying the word ‘police’ on their uniforms, routinely cause confusion between their authority and that of local law enforcement, which can result in immigrants allowing federal agents to enter their homes without a warrant,” New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker said last year. He co-introduced the act with New York Rep. Nydia Velázquez, who said she’d witnessed “firsthand the negative impacts that these bad-faith tactics of ICE bring to our communities and it certainly doesn’t make things any safer.”

Community-led campaigns and educational forums informing immigrants of their rights have had a notable effect. CHIRLA estimated that its “Know Your Rights” efforts had roughly 25,000 people in the early months of the Trump administration. Once again: If ICE agents don’t have a signed judicial warrant they can show you through a peephole or window, you do not have to let them in, nor do you have to step outside. Tell them to leave and to come back when they have a judge’s signature. Of course, it’s federal agents who need to be following the law in the first place—as well as stop engaging in highly unethical behavior, like pretending to be police when they’re not.

"Families subjected to these deceptive ICE procedures are unknowingly thrown into a carceral system they lack the legal resources to face," said CHIRLA Executive Director Angelica Salas. "These tactics are incursions into the privacy of our community members’ homes that gravely undermine efforts to bring about public safety by fostering trust. The court can and should put a stop to these unconstitutional practices once and for all."

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/15/2153110/-Litigation-challenging-ICE-s-deceptive-police-impersonation-tactic-granted-class-action-status

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