Today, we celebrate an extraordinary victory.
Detroit federal Judge Mark Goldsmith granted our request for a preliminary injunction halting the deportation of over 1,400 Iraqi nationals who call America home. For now, they will be able to stay in the country where they have raised families, paid taxes, and built careers. And they will be safe from the persecution, torture, and death that potentially awaits them in Iraq. The injunction extends the ban on deportations for a period of 90 days after each individual receives their immigration files, and then continues to remain in effect while they pursue their immigration cases.
"The United States has always been a place of refuge for people seeking freedom and safety from persecution," said ACLU-NM Staff Attorney Maria Martinez Sanchez. "Deporting men and women, many of whom have lived here for decades, into certain danger is unconscionable and a stain on our character. This important reprieve will provide the 1,400 Iraqis covered under our lawsuit a better opportunity to seek legal representation and make their case to a judge why being deported could be a death sentence."
This victory comes on the heels of winning two back-to-back two-week stays in our class action lawsuit with the ACLU of Michigan and the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project, filed in June. The Injunction issued today gives Iraqi nationals the time they need to argue before an immigration judge that they would face torture or death if deported.
The ACLU of New Mexico represents Albuquerque resident Abbas Oda Manshad Al-Sokaini, who fled from Iraq in 1996, fearing persecution for supporting the United States Military. He has lived in New Mexico for twenty-one years, with his wife, three stepchildren, eleven grandchildren, and five great grandchildren, all of whom are U.S. citizens, until ICE picked him up and sent him to detention in El Paso, Texas in June.
ICE targeted Abbas because of a non-violent drug conviction from 2000. He, along with hundreds of Iraqis with non-violent convictions, recently became eligible for deportation after President Trump struck a deal with Iraq. In exchange for removing Iraq from the Muslim travel ban list, the country agreed to accept deportees. Prior to this year, it would not take them back.
Abbas is hopeful that this injunction will give him the opportunity to reopen his case from 2000 and to go home to his family while his case is adjudicated, instead of languishing needlessly in detention. Above all, he hopes that the immigration court will ultimately rule in his favor so that he can continue to live in the country he loves, with the people he loves, rather than being sent to a country where his life would be in danger.
Abbas considers himself an American. Today’s news gives us hope that he will be treated as such. He, and the hundreds of others of Iraqis facing deportation deserve a new day in court and the opportunity to plead for their lives.
If the government appeals the ruling to the Sixth Circuit, we’ll continue to fight for all of their lives.
