Samuel Guzman was driving to his restaurant job in Annapolis one Sunday in June when he stopped for what he thought would be a quick coffee at a 7-Eleven. He had passed by immigration officers making arrests that morning, and recalls being worried about a co-worker who lived nearby. Guzman, who was born in Maryland but spent his childhood in Mexico, believed he had less to fear.
But as he left the store, Guzman, 24, said he was surrounded by masked officers wearing vests that read “Police ICE.” The officers shoved him against his car, emptied his pockets and put him in handcuffs, Guzman alleges in a new lawsuit. When Guzman told the officers he was a U.S. citizen, he says one replied: “If you are an American citizen, why don’t you speak better English?”
Guzman said he was taken to a nearby parking lot where he was held in handcuffs for more than an hour before being released with no explanation.
The incident is detailed in a 56-page lawsuit filed Thursday by four Maryland residents, including Guzman, and the immigrant rights’ group We Are CASA. In it, they accuse immigration officials of unlawfully arresting scores of residents without warrants or probable cause. Similar suits have been filed by advocacy groups in other states and in D.C., where a judge last year limited the use of warrantless arrests.
As part of a crackdown under the Trump administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have detained thousands of immigrants across Maryland whom they say are in the country illegally. But the arrests have also swept up U.S. citizens and those with protections against being detained or deported.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland, alleges that ICE officers are ignoring legal requirements for warrantless immigration arrests: that there is probable cause that a person is in the country illegally and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.
The lawsuit also accuses ICE of using aggressive tactics, including following work trucks in unmarked vehicles, smashing car windows to arrest motorists and detaining bystanders regardless of an intended target.
The plaintiffs are seeking a temporary injunction to block ICE from continuing warrantless arrests while the legal battle plays out.
The lawsuit names ICE, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, as well the leaders of each agency, as defendants.
“Not only are these arrests extremely devastating, violent and harmful, they’re also illegal,” Shana Khader, legal director at We Are CASA, said in an interview. “Oftentimes, they are arresting people without even knowing who they are, without even asking their names, without knowing anything about where they’re from or whether they pose a risk of escape.”
Austin Rose, managing attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which is also representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement that, “As ICE roams Maryland’s streets looking for people to arrest to fill their quotas, our Brown and Black immigrant neighbors live in constant fear.”
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said allegations that its officers engage in racial profiling “are disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE. What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S.— NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit describes several other plaintiffs, referred to by their initials, as being arrested by immigration officers without warrants, including J.M.R, a 40-year-old Latino man detained in July.
The man says in the court filings that he was driving to a worksite in Silver Spring when unmarked vehicles boxed him in. The man alleges that officers pulled him from his car and threw him to the ground. As he tried to stand, he says in the filings, he felt a “horrible electric shock in my chest and my stomach” as the officers shot him with a Taser for allegedly resisting arrest.
The man had blood on his chest and stomach from where he was Tasered and the officers took him to a hospital before transporting him to an ICE facility in Virginia, according to the man’s account filed with the lawsuit. After nearly two weeks, a federal judge ruled the man’s detention was unlawful and ordered his release.
J.M.R. described the experience as leaving him traumatized and afraid to leave the house.
“I am not the same as I was before my detention,” he says in a declaration filed with the complaint. “Especially when I am driving, I feel constantly nervous and suspicious; when I see cars with dark windows that look like ICE, I fear I am being followed.”
Federal immigration officers have detained about 9,000 immigrants in Maryland since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, according to government data released by the Deportation Data Project. ICE arrests in the state spiked in January, according to the data, leading to overcrowding at an immigration enforcement facility in Baltimore. Allegations of “inhumane” conditions at the Baltimore facility in past months drew intense public scrutiny from activists and lawmakers, including lawsuits and an investigation by Maryland’s attorney general’s office.
The lawsuit comes a day after Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) filed a joint brief supporting limits on warrantless ICE arrests in a separate federal case.
“Congress established specific legal requirements that ICE must meet before making a warrantless arrest, and those requirements are not optional,” Brown said in a statement Wednesday.
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