Border agents in Calais wrongfully arrested a Venezuelan man with lawful documentation to work and reside in the U.S. earlier this spring after a “concerned citizen” reported his construction crew’s van at a local gas station, according to court documents.
Jeanfranco Alejandro Flores Salazar went on to spend 65 days behind bars in federal detention centers around New England without any legal basis for imprisonment, a period of detention that federal officials later acknowledged was an “error” and “oversight.”
The details of his case demonstrate the kind of mistakes that some say are happening more around the country with immigration officials under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration to deliver on his campaign promise of record deportations. April apprehensions here hit a 24-year high, and the government has promoted arrests of alleged gang members.
This very different type of case was detailed in filings in a U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, where Flores Salazar filed a petition seeking to be released from custody. He was freed May 10. This week, a judge issued a ruling outlining the errors and ordering the government to remove an ankle monitor and supervision provisions imposed when he was released.
“Put simply, the evidence overwhelmingly establishes, including through concessions by [Customs and Border Protection] and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], that Flores Salazar was detained without any lawful basis,” U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin wrote in Wednesday’s strongly worded decision.
Spokespeople for CBP and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case. Flores Salazar’s Massachusetts-based attorney, Claire Maguire, declined comment.
Last July, Flores Salazar arranged for an interview with border agents in Texas after fleeing political persecution in Venezuela, hoping to seek asylum in the U.S., court documents say. Due to a lack of criminal history or previous immigration violations, the agents granted him parole, meaning he could remain free in the country for two years so long as he formally applied for asylum within a year.
He later obtained authorization to work and got a job with a construction company that took him to job sites around the country. That job took him to Down East Maine.
On March 4, a Calais resident called the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and reported a black van with out-of-state plates “transporting approximately seven possible illegal aliens,” according to the judge’s decision. Two agents found the van the following morning at the Calais Motor Inn, encountering six men loading into a truck on their way to a job site, including Flores Salazar.
Flores Salazar and three others produced valid work permits. Even so, he and others were brought to the Calais station, where court records show the agents performed a records check revealing Flores Salazar’s previous meeting with agents in Texas. An official at the Calais station authorized an arrest warrant for the man anyway, according to the filing.
In federal court, the agency would later say the agents were not aware the parole granted to Flores Salazar was still in effect, calling the mistake an “administrative oversight.”
The judge in Massachusetts did not buy that: “It is undisputed that Flores Salazar had permission to be in the United States on March 5, that he had committed no crime, and that CBP knew these things when it detained him,” Sorokin wrote this week.
Flores Salazar then spent more than two months in detention in Vermont and Massachusetts in the custody of ICE. During that period, he received a notice that his parole had been revoked, though the judge who reviewed his detention would later acknowledge that federal officials were unable to later provide a reason for the revocation and cannot revoke it without one.
An ICE official only conducted a review of his case after Flores Salazar filed a petition on April 29 challenging the legality of his imprisonment. In that petition, he claimed that the border agents who arrested him in Maine told him they were detaining him to see if his work permit and Social Security number were fake.
An ICE official later attributed the man’s detention to “human error,” according to the judge’s decision this week.
Callie Ferguson is the deputy investigations editor for Maine Focus, the BDN’s investigations team. She can be reached at [email protected].
