Above Photo: Immigration lawyer Ava Benach says that ICE officers were “just sort of roaming the hall” of a D.C. residential building that many Central Americans call home. Gregory Bull, File / AP Photo
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers hung around in the hallway of a D.C. residential building that many Central Americans call home, and conducted a search on the first apartment that opened its door, says a lawyer for a resident who was arrested by those officers in November. He is still detained and has yet to receive a bond hearing, his lawyer says.
Ava Benach is an immigration lawyer in D.C. who was called by a prominent restaurant group to represent one of their workers, she tells DCist. She says she is not allowed to name the restaurant group or the man who was arrested, who worked for 15 years as a chef at a D.C. restaurant owned by the group.
“Assuming my client’s information is correct, and I don’t have any reason to doubt this … ICE officers were just sort of roaming the hall of a potentially target-rich environment,” she says.
Here’s what Benach says she learned from her client about the arrest after visiting him at the jail in Caroline County, Md. where he’s currently being held: In the early morning hours of November 21, ICE officers were hanging around in the hallway of the residential building on upper North Capitol area where he has lived for more than a decade. He was still sleeping when one of his roommates left around 5:30 a.m. for a construction job. The ICE officers then gained entry into the apartment (Benach says it’s unclear exactly how officers did this) and then made everyone submit to fingerprinting and an identification check.
“It seems to me that this [search] could very well have been illegal,” says Benach. “We have a Fourth Amendment. It applies to everyone in the U.S., and [law enforcement agents] have to have a reason to come into the home. It has to be articulable—they have to say, ‘We’re looking for X or Y.’ It just seems that they were in a building known to be full of Central Americans and just kind of trying their luck in the apartment … I think that people would be surprised to know that ICE officers feel sufficiently free to just barge into an apartment at 5:30 in the morning without any reasonable suspicion that a particular undocumented immigrant or fugitive from justice is in there.”
When officers fingerprinted Benach’s client, his prints came up because of an old arrest, for which charges were ultimately dismissed, per his lawyer. However, ICE instead arrested him for entering the United States illegally 17 years ago, and he remains in custody in Caroline County, about two hours away from D.C. He is currently undergoing deportation proceedings.
Benach got involved after his employer called and hired her. “The man has got no family, he’s got no girlfriend, no boyfriend. He works—that’s what he does,” she says. “He cooks and his family is the group of cooks he’s been with forever. It’s nice to see that loyalty paid back by the employer.”
Almost a month after his initial detention, he still hasn’t gotten a bond hearing, per Benach. As of today, a hearing has been scheduled for January 10, approximately 50 days after he was first arrested. “It took me almost a month just to get him scheduled for a hearing on whether or not he can be released from jail, and that’s insane,” says Benach. “If you’re arrested for a crime, you see a judge about bail in 24, 48, maybe 72 hours. Here he is arrested for a civil violation, and he can’t even have a date that he knows he’s gonna be heard for almost a month.”
ICE has not responded to requests for comment.
Benach says that, for most of her career, “you could expect to have a bond hearing within 10-15 days. This is worse. The court system is overwhelmed. ICE is detaining people at record numbers and the court can’t keep up with it.”
Since President Donald Trump took office, the number of pending cases in immigration courts has grown by more than 25 percent, the Wall Street Journal reported last year, and the backlog of cases has doubled over the past six years. This is part of the rollback of policies implemented in the latter years of President Barack Obama’s time in office, which called for fewer arrests of undocumented immigrants who did not have criminal convictions.
Since Trump’s election, Mayor Muriel Bowser has consistently stated that D.C. is a sanctuary city. While that term does not have a legal definition, it generally means that local law enforcement doesn’t ask about immigration status during routine stops and limits cooperation with federal deportation orders. However, D.C.’s Department of Corrections handed over more than 40 undocumented immigrants to ICE between 2016-2019, Washington City Paper reported. That prompted the D.C. Council to pass emergency legislation to further limit information sharing between the city and federal immigration enforcement, though the final version of the legislation was approved with some loopholes.
Benach says that the designation of sanctuary city has nothing to do with whether ICE can operate within a jurisdiction and “really has very little to do with what happened here.”
On January 10, Benach plans to ask the judge to release her client, pending his deportation proceedings. She believes that, because he doesn’t have family in the States, it will be harder for him to fight deportation (having U.S. citizens as family members increases a person’s ability to avoid removal), so authorities view him as more of a flight risk. But she doesn’t agree. “He’s worked in the same place for 15 years and lived in the same place for more than 10,” she says.
If he wants to fight deportation proceedings, the process could take six to nine months if he remains detained and two to four years if he is released. “This is a guy who’s never been in jail before in his life,” says Benach. “Maybe he’s tolerating a couple months but can he tolerate six months? Can he tolerate a year? I don’t know.”