ICE detainee’s story highlights due process gaps: NPR

Samantha Sorovtsev met her husband Roman Sorovtsev in 2017 while water skiing.

When they started dating, Surovtsev was honest about his past. He told her that he came from the former Soviet Union as a refugee when he was four years old. As a teenager, his green card was revoked after he pleaded guilty to car theft and burglary charges in California.

He explained that after his release from prison, in 2014, he spent time in ICE custody while they tried — and failed — to deport him to Ukraine and Russia.

Both countries, according to legal filings reviewed by NPR, have been unable to provide or confirm Sorovtsev’s citizenship since he left before the fall of the Soviet Union. They were unable to give him the travel documents needed for deportation.

Since then, Roman Sorovtsev has checked in with ICE every year.

Meanwhile, the Sorovtsev family’s life was following the path of thousands of immigrants in the United States who are considered stateless. They got married, had kids, and moved out Small commercial painting company in texas.

Then, one day in early August, what should have been a 10-minute stint at a kiosk in the Dallas ICE field office doing a regular check-in turned into a 30-minute wait in the parking lot, “praying that he wouldn’t get detained,” his wife told NPR.

“There were tears, just not knowing what was on the other side of that appointment,” Samantha Surovtsev recalls. Then she got that call: “I panicked. I panicked because he said, ‘This is a call from a detainee.'”

Roman Sorovtsev joined the trend of others in detention undergoing regular check-ins with ICE, meeting the agency’s annual deportation goal of 1 million people.

“The human element”

What makes his case different is that his wife organized a team of lawyers on his behalf. Unlike hundreds of others the Trump administration has pledged to deport as part of its mass deportation goal, Sorovtsev has a chance to make his case before a judge.

“People need to understand that there is a human element to immigration, and that every story is unique,” ​​his wife said. “Every case deserves to be heard in front of a judge. This is not a black and white situation.”

According to Sorovtsev’s family attorney and court filings, ICE is trying for a second time to deport Roman to Ukraine, which does not have the necessary documents to prove his citizenship and could drag him into an armed conflict. In court filings, his lawyers say his re-detention is unconstitutional because no change was made to facilitate his deportation to his place of birth and that “there is little likelihood that Roman will be deported in the reasonably foreseeable future.”

The absurdity of his placement in the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Texas has been highlighted. north texas detention site, Which was beyond its population capacity this summeralso Sheltering Venezuelan immigrants.

Sorovtsev received deportation travel papers in the Ukrainian language, according to a court declaration issued by Zachary Haggerty, the deportation officer handling Sorovtsev. Surovtsev, who is fluent in English, does not speak or read Ukrainian.

In court filings, the Justice Department, which is defending these cases on behalf of the government, said the re-detention was lawful because the agency again requested new travel documents from Ukraine.

Hagerty said in his announcement that he believed it was at least possible for Sorovtsev to be extradited to a third country, if not to Ukraine.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on his specific case.

Meanwhile, his legal team successfully overturned his criminal conviction for carjacking, arguing that he was not informed of the consequences of his immigration status when he originally pleaded guilty as a teenager.

“It’s not a complicated issue. It’s not a discretionary issue,” said Eric Lee, a partner at the law firm Lee and Godshall-Bennett, one of the firms handling the case. “He will get his green card back within a period of time, which makes it even more cruel and ridiculous that the administration is continuing to try to deport him to a country to which deportation would be a death sentence.”

Navigate due process

During more than two months of Sorovtsev’s detention, he did not miss his wedding anniversary, the birthdays of his wife and daughter, and his mother’s recent health problems. His wife, Samantha, had to cut jobs for about two months at their painting company and their two employees are out of work.

She told NPR that every day she turns down about five potential clients, letting clients know there’s a family emergency. Instead, she spent her time working with numerous attorneys across the country to overturn her husband’s conviction, reinstate his green card and release him from detention.

Immigration advocates say the Trump administration’s rapid approach to increasing arrests and deportations reduces the limited due process immigrants have access to. They said this due process is partly intended to reduce the chances of mistakes and prevent someone from being removed when they have valid claims to remain.

Lawyers say the Trump administration has taken steps to undermine due process. Earlier this year, the president said it was not possible for all the people he wants to impeach to get a trial.

Immigration officers have been asked to make arrests in court, even as judges have asked immigrants to return to their case. The Department of Homeland Security issued an order to detain immigrants while they undergo processing, with such detention mandatory for those who entered without legal status.

“However, there are a lot of people in this situation,” said Chris Godshall Bennett, a constitutional and civil rights attorney and another lawyer for Sorovtsev. “There were several habeas corpus cases filed over the summer on very similar facts regarding re-detention,” referring to the legal avenue for people to claim that their detention is unlawful.

The process can be slow, and most people in immigration detention centers and in immigration courts do not have legal representation to discuss the details of their cases. Lee, the other lawyer in Sorovtsev’s case, said this operation shows that the government is once again trying to do something it cannot do: deport Sorovtsev to Ukraine.

“The danger here is not simply that people will be sent somewhere wrong,” Lee said. “The danger is that the government will do it deliberately in a way that ignores those protections.” “By ignoring those protections for a subset of individuals, he has opened the door to being ignored. Period.”