In reporting on the status of President Trump’s mass deportation agenda in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Standard covered a series of federal court rulings that rebuke the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including three cases brought by Keker, Van Nest & Peters and its nonprofit partners.
In an “avalanche of cases brought by Bay Area lawyers,” the article reports that federal courts in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, have issued dozens of orders addressing unlawful deportations and detention practices in cases brought by a loose coalition of Bay Area legal nonprofits and private lawyers. “San Franciscans are resilient and not easily intimidated,” Keker partner Steven Ragland told the SF Standard. “We have lawyers here who will bring the cases.”
Ragland and his team scored a significant victory in a case challenging conditions at the largest ICE detention facility in California. U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney ordered ICE and DHS to provide competent and consistent medical care to more than 1,000 people detained at the California City Detention Facility and appointed an independent monitor to ensure compliance. The class action, Gomez Ruiz v. ICE, was filed by Keker, Van Nest & Peters alongside the Prison Law Office, the ACLU, and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.
The SF Standard’s report also cited victories in individual habeas cases and class actions that Keker attorneys helped secure. The firm took its first habeas case last summer “when a distressed man walked into the office pleading for help because his sister had just been detained by ICE at SF immigration court nearby.” Keker attorneys secured the woman’s release within 48 hours.
That case led Keker attorneys to join the ACLU in bringing a class action. In that case, as the SF Standard reported, Judge Casey Pitts issued an order halting ICE’s practice of arresting migrants at immigration courts. The SF Standard further reported that since that order, ICE has not detained anyone at San Francisco’s immigration court.
Read the San Francisco Standard article here.
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