(CN) - The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada on Wednesday asked a state court judge to stop Las Vegas police from holding inmates for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under an agreement signed in June.
Clark County District Judge Monica Trujillo didn't rule on the civil rights organization's petition but asked for additional briefing on the question of whether the case before her is moot given that the other petitioner, Sergio Morais-Hechavarria, who purportedly was held pursuant to an ICE warrant, is no longer in police custody and has been removed from the U.S.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department took active steps to limit Morais-Hechavarria's participation in the case by, two days after the lawsuit was filed, transferring him over to ICE, which led to his deportation, ACLU attorney Sadmira Ramic told the judge in arguing the organization should be allowed to litigate the challenge to police's agreement with ICE.
"They created the circumstances to where Mr. Morais-Hechavarria cannot be present in court right now," Ramic said.
As such, she said, the legitimacy of the police's agreement with ICE to arrest and detain people in their custody for immigration law violations would never be decided on the merits if a case gets mooted because the individual petitioners are handed over to ICE and out of the state judge's jurisdiction before it can be heard.
However, Alex Fugazzi, an attorney for the police department, insisted that Morais-Hechavarria's case was an unusual situation in which a convict was ordered by the judge to be sent to an inpatient treatment facility as part of his sentence while, at the same time, ICE had issued a warrant for him, leading to a judicial impasse.
"There is no delay waiting on ICE because there's a removal warrant," Fugazzi said. "There's absolutely no delay."
What happened, according to the lawyer, was that Las Vegas police notified ICE of the arrest and imminent release to inpatient care of Morais-Hechavarria under an established policy to do so if the offense involves a public safety matter.
In Morais-Hechavarria's case, Fugazzi argued, his referral to ICE was routine because he had been caught two years ago in a stolen Mercedes with methamphetamine and then failed to appear in court. Last June, he was arrested again for domestic battery on a pregnant woman, and while in prison, he started a fist fight.
The ACLU's petition focuses on the so-called 287(g) agreement that Las Vegas police entered into with ICE, as have other local and state law enforcement agencies across the U.S., whereby ICE trains and certifies local officers to serve and execute arrest and removal warrants on people in custody.
While Fugazzi admitted the agreement was signed in June, he said that no local police officers had been certified so far and that the agreement hadn't been implemented yet.
The ACLU argues the Las Vegas police's agreement with ICE violates the "Dillon Rule," which holds that unless the power to do something has been expressly granted to the county by the state legislature through the adoption of a statute, it does not possess it.
"They don't dispute that they have dedicated resources in effectuating this agreement," Ramic said, noting the police department has 25 officers dedicated to handling the hundreds of ICE warrants and detainers for people in their custody.
The only authority local law enforcement in Nevada has to hold people on behalf of the federal government, according to the ACLU, is when they are prisoners - detained for criminal conduct, not for civil, immigration violations - and the federal government covers the cost of their incarceration.
Source: Courthouse News Service
