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Federal immigration authorities lied to prosecutors in a case involving their removal of an immigrant from a Maine jail in conflict with a judge’s order, a lawyer said.
On Thursday, Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce gave a news conference criticizing U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement’s high-profile arrest of a corrections recruit on a Portland street. Later that day, ICE notified his office that it was removing detainees being held in Joyce’s jail, saying in a court filing that it was due to lack of bed space.
That was not true. On Friday, a top federal official cited Joyce’s hiring of the immigrant as the reason for the removals. U.S. District Court Judge John Woodcock Jr. later ordered the immediate release of a Brazilian immigrant, which was one of the two orders issued by federal judges in Maine that day compelling ICE to return detainees it had removed.
Those remarkable filings show Maine judges wrestling in real time with President Donald Trump’s hardline policies. It is an example of political and legal fallout from the Maine enforcement surge known as “Operation Catch of the Day.” A federal prosecutor had to file a rare correction to the court saying ICE decided to remove the detainees.
“The contents of that request were based on false information that we believe the government knew at the time they were submitting was false,” Jacob Binnall, one of the lawyers for Abigail Lima Da Silva O’Leary, the Brazilian immigrant who lives in Massachusetts, said. “That order was granted based on the assumption the government was telling the truth. It was not the truth.”
Spokespeople for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to additional requests for comment Monday. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Lizotte, the prosecutor assigned to the case, declined to comment on Binnall’s comments but said the office did not know of the error until Friday.
“This fact was not known until Friday afternoon,” he said.
Approximately 60 detainees were being held at the Portland jail before Joyce blasted ICE for “bush league” tactics in the arrest of corrections recruit Emanuel Ludovic Mbuangi Landila, an Angolan immigrant who was ripped out of his car Wednesday by agents who left the vehicle running on a Portland street.
On Jan. 21, O’Leary’s lawyers got an order approved by Woodcock preventing her removal from Maine for at least 72 hours. The next day, nearly three hours after Joyce held his news conference, ICE filed an emergency motion to remove O’Leary. By 8 p.m. she and the other detainees held there were gone. Woodcock’s order granting permission to remove her wasn’t approved until nearly 9 p.m., making her removal a violation of a previous order.
Binnall said O’Leary described the moment ICE came to collect their detainees on Thursday evening. She told him that ICE agents entered the jail loudly and announced all the ICE detainees were “getting the [expletive] out of there.” She and other detainees got five minutes to gather belongings and were ushered onto buses without knowing where they were going.
Woodcock’s ruling Friday wasn’t isolated. U.S. District Court Judge Stacey Neumann issued a similar finding in the case of Tong Qi Lu, who had been held at the jail for 10 months after being taken into custody by a Maine state trooper who transferred him to ICE.
Neumann had approved a request by Lu’s lawyer, Oriana Farhnam, who declined to comment, on Jan. 22 that barred ICE from removing the man from Maine. In an update to the court filed the next day, the U.S. attorney’s office said ICE had moved Lu to Massachusetts.
As Woodcock did, Neumann also ordered that Lu be immediately released from custody and barred him from being detained again while his case is pending. O’Leary and Lu are both free for now.
Sawyer Loftus is an investigative reporter for the BDN. He can be reached sloftus@bangordailynews.com.