A federal judge on Thursday ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ensure that detainees have access to their attorneys in Minnesota, after finding that the agency had blocked thousands of people from seeing their lawyers during a recent enforcement surge.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, said ICE’s practices during the recent Operation Metro Surge, including a policy of quickly moving detainees out of Minnesota and depriving them of phone calls, “all but extinguish a detainee’s access to counsel.”
Brasel made the initial ruling in a class action lawsuit that was filed on behalf of detainees on January 27 and her order will remain in place for 14 days while the proceedings play out.
The court order requires the government to stop rapidly transferring detainees out of the state and to allow attorney-client visits and private phone calls between detainees and their lawyers.
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said detainees have access to phones that they can use to contact their families and lawyers and denied that there was any “overcrowding” at the Minneapolis federal building where detainees are processed.
Democracy Forward, a nonprofit that filed the lawsuit on behalf of detainees, said that the right to a lawyer is not “optional” in the U.S.
“DHS has been detaining people in a building never meant for long-term custody, shackling them, secretly transferring them out of state and blocking access to counsel and oversight in a deliberate effort to evade accountability,” Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman said in a statement.