The ACLU has filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of immigrants who are being detained by ICE agents and denied bond hearings, contrary to statutory and constitutional law, according to a copy of the complaint.
Agents from the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been upending and ignoring decades of federal immigration law by regularly misclassifying immigrants nationwide and placing them in mandatory detention without granting them bond hearings, according to the 19-page complaint, which was filed in Boston on Monday.
If this unlawful practice does not come to an end, “thousands in Massachusetts will be denied due process,” the lawsuit said.
“A bond hearing with strong procedural protections is not mere regulatory grace; it is the baseline due process requirement for [immigration] detainees,” the complaint said.
The ACLU of Massachusetts filed the civil suit with the ACLU in New Hampshire and Maine, as well as the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Right Project, Harvard’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, and two Boston-based law firms.
The Trump administration is ignoring immigration rights enshrined in law and “jailing people arbitrarily without a hearing,” Daniel McFadden, managing attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement.
The class-action suit was filed in the name of Jose Arnulfo Guerrero Orellana, an immigrant who has been living in the United States for over a decade and was arrested in Massachusetts on Sept. 18 when the vehicle he was riding in was pulled over, the complaint said.
Orellana, a married father of a little girl who is a US citizen, has no criminal record and was not the subject of the traffic stop, yet he has been detained since his arrest and has not been granted a bond hearing, according to the suit.
Orellana seeks a bond hearing so an immigration judge can determine whether his detention is justified to protect the community or ensure his appearance in court, the complaint said.
Immigration law established in 1996, ensures that those arrested and detained for civil immigration violations and placed in removal proceedings are entitled to bond hearings whether they entered the country legally or not.
But on July 8, an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo declared millions of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond hearings.
While immigrants who have not committed a crime are typically released on bond as their cases wind through immigration court, the memo directed ICE officers to detain people who entered the country without permission for the duration of their deportation proceedings.
And then, on Sept. 5, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a decision that “purports to require all immigration judges to misclassify people in this manner,” the suit said.
“All people in the United States are entitled to due process — without exception,” McFadden said in the statement. “When the government arrests any person inside the United States, it must be required to prove to a judge that there is an actual reason for the person’s detention.”
Max Brooks, an immigration attorney with the ACLU of Maine, said in the statement that, “millions of people who have been waiting for their day in court are now at risk of being jailed indefinitely over civil violations.”
Tonya Alanez can be reached at tonya.alanez@globe.com. Follow her @talanez.