Lawsuit claims immigration raids are unconstitutional

by Brian Donohue/The Star-Ledger

Thursday April 03, 2008, 11:30 AM

Warrantless immigration raids that have led to the deportation of hundreds of illegal immigrants living in New Jersey in recent years violate the U.S. Constitution, a human rights group associated with Seton Hall University charges in a lawsuit filed today.

The lawsuit, filed by Seton Hall Law School's Center for Social Justice and the Roseland law firm Lowenstein Sandler, challenges a growing and widespread tactic by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in which immigrants are arrested at their homes in pre-dawn raids.

Based on eight home raids that occurred across New Jersey between August 2006 and January 2008, the suit alleges ICE agents lied about their identity, illegally forced their way into homes and often claimed to be looking for someone who did not even live at the address.

In some cases, the plaintiffs charge, they arrested and detained people living legally in the U.S.

"This is the first lawsuit in the country to focus on the consistency of these abusive home raid practices across an entire state, and over a significant period of time,'' Bassina Farbenblum, an attorney at the Seton Hall Center for Social Justice, said in a prepared release.

"Our complaint shows that what happened to our plaintiffs in the middle of the night was not exceptional," she added. "It was part of a routine, widespread practice, condoned at the highest levels of government, that tramples the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike."

None of the raids involved valid warrants and none of the eight gave consent for agents to enter their homes, the lawsuit says.

In one case, Maria Argueta, a legal U.S. resident living in North Bergen, says she was arrested by agents who did not ask to check her paperwork, detained 24 hours without food or water. In another, ICE agents and police from Penn's Grove stormed a house with guns drawn, looking for a man ICE had deported two years earlier.

In New Jersey, the raids are conducted by four fugitive operations teams, part of a nationwide program launched in 2003 to round up illegal immigrants who had ignored old deportation orders.

The program once set a goal of making criminals comprise 75 percent of its arrests. But government auditors found that, in order to boost arrest statistics and meet the 1,000-arrests-per-year quota set by their bosses, agents turned their attention away from criminals and other tough targets, such as illegal immigrants who use fake or stolen identities, government auditors found last year.

In a story published in December, The Star-Ledger reported the four New Jersey teams arrested 2,079 people in the year that ended Sept. 30 - twice as many as the year before, when two teams were on the streets. The paper found that 88 percent of those arrested had no criminal histories and were picked up instead for civil immigration violations.