(WASHINGTON) – The Trump administration is still arresting immigrants in D.C. without warrants or probable cause despite a judge’s previous ruling that the practice was unlawful, a coalition of immigrant rights groups alleges in a recent court filing.
A federal judge ruled in December that the administration’s use of warrantless immigration arrests likely violated federal law and issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting such arrests without probable cause. The ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by immigrant rights groups and four migrants who were arrested without warrants last year during President Donald Trump’s law enforcement surge in the capital.
But federal immigration officials in D.C. are failing to comply with that order, continuing to make warrantless arrests “without the required probable cause determinations,” according to the Feb. 19 motion by plaintiffs.
The lawsuit alleges immigration authorities began operating under an “arrest first, ask questions later” policy to comply with arrest quotas imposed after Trump took office last year – and started to ignore the probable cause requirements under immigration law.
The plaintiffs accuse federal agencies of circumventing two statutory requirements its officers must meet before making a warrantless arrest: probable cause that the person being arrested is in the U.S. illegally, and probable cause that they are likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.
“The court was clear in its December order: federal agents cannot carry out warrantless civil immigration arrests in D.C. without an individualized, documented probable cause determination that a person is a flight risk,” said Ama Frimpong, legal director at CASA, an immigrant rights group and plaintiff in the case.
“Yet, ICE and DHS agents continue to arrest individuals in D.C. without the individualized probable cause determination that federal law requires,” Frimpong said in a statement emailed to Capital News Service. “When agents rely on vague, boilerplate narratives instead of specific facts, they are violating the court’s order and unlawfully arresting D.C. residents.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Warrantless immigration arrests in the capital spiked in August during Trump’s law enforcement surge, according to the complaint. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, sometimes in cooperation with D.C. police and other federal law enforcement, arrested hundreds of immigrants they said were in the country illegally. Most of those arrested had no prior criminal record; some had pending asylum applications, according to the lawsuit.
Last week’s filing, which asks the court to enforce its previous order, includes accounts of several immigrants who were allegedly arrested in violation of the injunction.
Jose Argueta had recently reported his car stolen in Maryland when he received a call last December from someone claiming to be a D.C. police officer who told him his car had been found. He was told to pick it up at a police station in northeast Washington.
But once he entered the station, Argueta said in a written declaration, he was arrested by officers “wearing normal clothes with vests,” one of whom had “ICE” on his shirt. The officers, who identified themselves as ICE, said they used information from his stolen vehicle report to determine he was in the U.S. illegally.
Argueta said he spent about a month in ICE detention before being released on bond in January.
“They tricked me into coming to the station to arrest me. I was just trying to get my car
back, but it was all a lie,” he said in the filing.
In another declaration submitted to the court, a Venezuelan man said a D.C. police officer pulled him over because the license plate on his motorcycle was expired. The officer then handcuffed him and took him to a police station, he said. According to the declaration, another official “wearing different clothes” was with the D.C. officer at the traffic stop.
The man – who submitted his declaration under the pseudonym “Benito Lopez” out of fear of retaliation – said he had a pending asylum application and had been working as a delivery driver.
Lopez said he spent roughly three hours at the police station, before he was given a court date and told he was free to go. But as he was preparing to leave the station, two men wearing green vests – one of whom was the same man who was accompanying the D.C. officer earlier – approached and handcuffed him again, Lopez recalled. They told him they were with Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of DHS.
“I asked, ‘why are you arresting me again?’ They told me that ‘You are done with them but not with us,’” Lopez said. He has since been deported, according to his declaration.
In their declarations, both Lopez and Argueta said they were never presented with a warrant or given an explanation of why they were being arrested.
The arrests also revived concerns about D.C. police cooperation with immigration authorities. After Trump declared a crime emergency last August and took temporary control over the local force, D.C. police officers frequently worked alongside federal agents making immigration arrests. The federal takeover ended in September, but D.C. police officers continue to share information about people not in their custody with immigration authorities, according to documents the department submitted to the D.C. Council this week as part of an annual oversight process.
But the extent of local police cooperation with immigration authorities remains unclear.
At a council hearing Wednesday, interim D.C. police chief Jeffrey Carroll said he didn’t know how many times officers had shared information with ICE, saying the department does not track that data.
Asked by the council about Argueta’s arrest, and D.C. police’s alleged role, Carroll said, “Obviously it sounds not good, but we need to investigate that to find out what happened.”
A police spokesperson declined comment, referring CNS to Carroll’s remarks at the council hearing.
Austin Rose, an attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said the involvement of D.C. police in arresting Argueta and Lopez appears to go against the city’s sanctuary law, which prohibits the department from providing a detainee’s information, or allowing their transfer, to immigration authorities without a warrant.
The arrests, “in my view are pretty clear violations of specific provisions of the Sanctuary Values Act,” Rose said. “They both involve information sharing seemingly between [D.C. police], or other bodies of the DC government, and ICE … and or transfers of custody from [D.C. police] into ICE custody, which I think is quite concerning.”
Rose said immigration arrests in the city seem to have slowed significantly since the surge last summer. The federal government – which must report D.C. warrantless immigration arrests to Amica under the injunction – reported 30 such arrests last December, compared with 11 in January, he said.
But Amica and the coalition of immigrant rights groups still want stronger enforcement of the court’s order.
“ At its core, this is about ICE detaining people to fill arrest quotas, essentially arresting people because they can, not because they should,” Rose said.
A hearing on the motion is scheduled for March 11.