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A federal judge in Boston sanctioned U.S. Customs and Enforcement last week for repeatedly “false and misleading” statements in court about an Ecuadoran detainee who was abruptly transferred out of Maine in January.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin blasted the agency for repeatedly misleading the court, unlawfully holding the detained woman without a bond hearing and deliberately disregarding her medical needs related to epilepsy, according to a May 20 order.
The ruling is a scathing example of the wave of judicial admonishments that have risen in response to the agency’s hard-charging tactics under President Donald Trump. A top regional immigration official had already admitted to making false statements to the court, the Bangor Daily News reported in February.
“By the Court’s count, the foregoing describes at least half a dozen ways in which ICE disregarded the standards the Constitution demands of a government agency responsible for the health and safety of a person it has chosen to detain,” Sorokin wrote in his 30-page order.
He had previously ordered the woman released from custody and has now barred agents from re-arresting her.
Sorokin also ordered the federal government to pay her legal fees estimated at nearly $15,000, according to a filing by her lawyer, Julia Ciachurski of the PAIR Project, a Boston nonprofit that provides free legal services to detained immigrants.
The woman, who says she is a survivor of sexual abuse and human trafficking, arrived in the United States in 2022, according to court records. An immigration judge previously issued an order barring her return to Ecuador, finding she would likely face persecution there, according to court documents. She has no criminal history and has a pending asylum appeal.
She spent five months in custody at the Cumberland County Jail in Portland until January 22, when the agency suddenly removed all of its detainees from the facility during a massive immigration operation in southern Maine.
ICE initially claimed in court that her transfer to a Massachusetts field office was necessary due to an emergency. But that explanation didn’t add up, Sorokin found, citing a BDN story that first reported how the agency’s abrupt decision came hours after Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce publicly criticized ICE’s tactics during the Maine raid. (ICE later confirmed that it pulled its detainees because of the sheriff’s comments.)
After her removal from the jail, the woman was packed into a holding room at the ICE field office in Burlington, Massachusetts, with dozens of other women, according to court records. They shared a single toilet and there were no beds. She suffered a seizure that required medical intervention.
ICE said the woman was receiving her epilepsy medication during that time — a claim Sorokin found to be “another false and misleading statement of fact.” The next morning, she was shackled, driven to Hanscom Airfield in Bedford, and flown to Louisiana without food, bathroom access and epilepsy medication, despite ICE’s knowledge of her condition, the judge wrote.
In Louisiana, she received no medication upon arrival, nor for several days afterward, and suffered as many as five or six seizures in a single day, according to court documents.
In February, Sorokin oversaw a hearing to determine whether the agency had disobeyed a court order that had barred her transfer from Massachusetts.
During that proceeding, Brian Sullivan, the acting assistant director of ICE’s Boston field office, which oversees New England, admitted that documents he submitted in court were not true nor written by him, though he had previously sworn they were true and were authored by him.
Sullivan’s approach reflected “a careless and indifferent approach to a sworn declaration, submitted to a federal court on behalf of ICE, concerning a pivotal, jurisdictional fact,” Sorokin wrote.
