The Trump Administration’s green light to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to detain and hold a man from West Africa who has lived in the United States for more than three decades violated the man’s due process rights and ICE’s own regulations, according to a federal judge who also called the move “downright frightening.”
In an order issued Friday—just days before Donald Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he wasn’t sure if noncitizens in the U.S. were entitled to due process— U.S. District Judge Lawrence J. Vilardo demanded the release of Sering Ceesay, a 63-year-old native of Gambia who lives in New York.
Ceesay, who is currently being represented by the organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, filed a petition of habeas corpus over his detention. As Vilardo noted, Ceesay wasn’t challenging ICE’s “substantive authority” to detain him, but rather “the fact that he is being held without the proper procedures.”
The judge, a Barack Obama appointee, agreed, and took the government to task for its argument that Ceesay would have been detained even if it had provided him with due process.
“[T]he government’s suggestion—that a complaint about failing to follow proper process is nonjusticiable so long as the government says that the result would have been the same had it followed the required procedure—is downright frightening,” the judge wrote in Friday’s order. “Procedure is not mere puffery, a gesture that is irrelevant so long as the result is correct. The Constitution safeguards not just substantive rights under the law but due process as well. That process is at the core of what our Constitution guarantees.”
Read the full article here.
Learn more about the case here.
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