Detainees blocked by ICE

Feb 12 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Thursday ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ensure detainees have access to their attorneys in Minnesota, after finding that the agency had prevented thousands of people from seeing their attorneys during a recent enforcement surge.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, said that ICE practices during the recent Operation Metro Surge, including a policy of quickly removing detainees from Minnesota and depriving them of phone calls, “virtually extinguishes the detainee’s access to an attorney.”

Brasel issued the initial ruling in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of detainees on Jan. 27, and his order will remain in effect for 14 days while the process unfolds.

The court order requires the government to stop rapidly transferring detainees out of state and allow attorney-client visits and private phone calls between detainees and their attorneys.

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Democracy Forward, a nonprofit that filed the lawsuit on behalf of the detainees, said the right to an attorney is not “optional” in the U.S.

“DHS has been detaining people in a building that was never intended for long-term custody, shackling them, secretly transferring them out of state, and blocking access to counseling and supervision in a deliberate effort to evade accountability,” Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman said in a statement.

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

ICE did not dispute that detainees had a constitutional right to counsel and said it does not have a policy preventing detainees from seeing their attorneys, according to the ruling. But in practice, it provided conditions that isolated thousands of people from their lawyers, Brasel said.

The plaintiffs, who are non-citizen detainees, had provided substantial and specific evidence about their detention conditions, which contradicted ICE’s “frayed” explanations of its policies and its protests that it did not have sufficient resources to provide detainees with access to their attorneys, the judge concluded.

“Defendants allocated substantial resources to send thousands of officers to Minnesota, detain thousands of people, and house them in their facilities,” Brasel said in his ruling. “Defendants cannot suddenly lack recourse when it comes to protecting detainees’ constitutional rights.”

Most detainees are initially held at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, but many are immediately transferred out of state, without notice, with no way for lawyers to contact them, according to the ruling.

Sometimes detainees are moved so quickly and frequently that ICE loses track of where they are, the judge concluded.

(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)