An Oregon judge offered her own lunch to a young woman in immigration custody after she testified that she hadn’t eaten anything for hours.
The 22-year-old woman appeared at 9:30 a.m. Monday in a Eugene court after she was rousted at 2 a.m. from a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, and U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken said she would not continue the hearing until the federal officers fed the Guatemalan national, reported The Oregonian.
“Okay, that’s unacceptable,” the judge said, about eight minutes into the hearing. “I’m extraordinarily upset and disappointed that’s how we’re treating people.”
Aiken then directed lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice who were representing the government in court to pass along her disgust to their superiors.
“That should never happen, I am absolutely appalled,” the judge said. “That needs to go all the way up the chain. We do not treat people this way, period, and I mean that.”
“We are all working to make sure that a system that has been flooded unnecessarily in a crisis without preparation is still going to hold onto the principles of dignity, respect, the rule of law and the humane treatment of people,” Aiken added. “We are not some of those other countries that do not respect and treat people in our custody the way she’s just been treated. I will not tolerate it.”
The judge resumed the hearing about five minutes later and asked the woman what she had been served, and she told the court through an interpreter that she had been given two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, an apple, some chips and water.
Aiken ordered the woman’s immediate release from detention after finding that far more than 90 days had passed since she the government had ordered her removal in 2017, when she was a child.
She had been detained by ICE officers on Oct. 28 while riding in a van to her job making wreaths on a holly farm near Woodburn and later taken to a Louisiana processing center, according to court testimony.
The woman has lived in Woodburn for seven years with a sibling and friend, and her lawyers said she’s never been arrested for any crime during her time in the U.S.
She testified that she had not been aware she faced a deportation order until she was taken to the Tacoma processing center after her arrest, and her lawyers argued the government had missed its lawful deadline to place her under supervision when the 90-day deportation period ended, and the judge agreed.
Attorneys from the Innovation Lab said they intended to file a class-action lawsuit challenging what they called an illegal “dragnet” that resulted in the woman’s arrests and the arrests of other immigrants in October and November as what they described as an “ongoing scheme to violate statutory and constitutional rights of Oregonians” to reach deportation quotas set by the Trump administration.
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