U.S. citizens and legal immigrants mistakenly caught during immigration raids are turning in increasing numbers to the government to demand compensation for violation of their rights. Will this trend be a deterrent to future raids?
An accountant working for Micro Solutions Enterprises (MSE), a company based in Van Nuys, California that manufactures and distributes toner cartridges, Nitin Dhopade, 47, was on his way to the payroll office when he saw dozens of immigration agents, armed and dressed in bulletproof vests.
"They walked me and more than 30 other employees to a lobby and lined us up along the wall. We were told not to touch anything or use cell phones. The ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) agents interrogated us for an hour, and we could only use the restrooms under escort," said Dhopade, a naturalized U.S. citizen from India. He is a victim of an immigration raid carried out at his workplace at the beginning of February.
The raid was a result of an anonymous report to ICE, which stated that some of the MSE employees used false Social Security numbers. MSE management claims that they had no knowledge of the situation and states that they will check carefully the immigration status of all new employees, in compliance with new immigration regulations.
Of the 238 employees arrested during the several-hours-long raid, 138 were in the United States illegally. The remaining 100 employees, who were legal immigrants or U.S. citizen and were caught in the raid, are now demanding compensation from the U.S. government – $5,000 per person – and to receive legal representation from the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CHRCL).
Lawsuits and claims against the government are the newest strategy used by pro-immigration activists and lawyers, whose goal is to convince immigration authorities to stop raiding businesses. As statistics show, last year alone immigration officers arrested 10 times as many people as they did five years ago. In 2007, 863 of the arrested immigrants were charged with crimes and misdemeanors – such as using false Social Security numbers – and 4,077 were found to be illegally in the United States; most of these have been deported.
So far in 2008, 850 criminal and 2,900 immigration charges have been filed by ICE. "In my opinion they just want publicity," says Peter Schey, director of CHRCL. An article in USA Today, published on June 25, on a lawsuit filed by documented immigrants, gave two examples of violations of constitutional rights. One concerned the case of Denise Shippy, a U.S. citizen, who worked as a secretary at MSE and was detained, along with her two children, by armed officers, for over an hour. The second case concerned 30-year-old Jesus Garcia, a green-card holder, who was mistakenly arrested, for over 30 hours, during a raid on a poultry farm in Texas, where he worked. It is too early to tell if this strategy to stop raids in the workplace will be effective. Meanwhile, immigration authority representatives agree that raids are terrible; however, the accidental apprehension of legal U.S. residents in those raids cannot be avoided.
