Trump administration officials from the top down keep insisting that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients have nothing to worry about, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have already been targeting them for arrest and deportation. Last year, Seattle resident Daniel Ramirez Medina became one of the first DACA recipients of the Trump era to be arrested by ICE, when he was swept up in a raid that was initially targeting his dad. He was finally released from custody six weeks later, but not before being falsely accused of gang affiliations and stripped of his DACA protections. Now he’s fighting to win them back:
Last year, Ramirez’s lawyers—one of whom is a DACA recipient himself—argued that Ramirez was unlawfully detained and denied due process. On Tuesday, those lawyers filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to restore Ramirez’s DACA status while the lawsuit is pending.
“Quite simply, Daniel must have his DACA status restored because it never should have been removed in the first place,” said Ethan Dettmer, a member of Ramirez’s legal team, said in a statement. “Daniel is the father of a U.S. citizen, and the government admits Daniel is not a threat to public safety, yet he was kept behind bars for six weeks and is being deprived of the ability to earn a living and support his family.”
“Daniel should have the benefits that the government promised him—the right to work and support his family and the right to not live in fear of arbitrary arrest,” Dettmer said. And it’s not just Ramirez Medina, but hundreds of thousands of other DACA recipients who signed up for the program in good faith, only to have the federal government rip the ground out from under them.