A federal judge has halted the deportation of a Maine man who says he had been held illegally by immigration officials at the Cumberland County Jail for eight months.
Eyidi Ambila, 44, who is originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was moved Tuesday to a jail in Burlington, Massachusetts, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine said.
U.S. District Judge John Woodcock issued an emergency ruling on Tuesday that prevents the federal government from sending Ambila out of the country.
Shortly before he issued that decision, the Department of Justice said Ambila was “confirmed on a flight to the Democratic Republic of Congo for removal in the immediate future” and that he “could be boarding an airplane and departing for the DRC as soon as this afternoon,” according to Woodcock’s order.
Ambila was moved out of the Portland facility three days after the ACLU filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf, arguing that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had held him illegally for eight months without providing any information about what they planned to do with him.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maine, which is representing the DOJ and ICE, asked Woodcock to dismiss the petition. They argued that Woodcock couldn’t consider the case because Ambila is no longer in the state and his deportation was “imminent,” according to the judge’s order.
ACLU attorney Anahita Sotoohi said that “raised a few alarms.”
The federal government has not been able to secure travel papers for Ambila since 2007, when it tried deporting him after a felony conviction, the ACLU has said. Sotoohi added that she’s not aware of any cases where someone has been deported without those documents.
“What the government has still failed to do is provide any information on a plan for Mr. Ambila,” she said, adding that she felt Woodcock’s order was “exactly what we’ve asked for and what we think is right.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maine didn’t respond to questions about Woodcock’s ruling and the decision to move Ambila to a different facility. Their written court filings were not publicly available Tuesday, but were referenced in Woodcock’s order.
Ambila had just finished serving a sentence at the jail in September after pleading guilty to two misdemeanor charges when he was immediately transferred to ICE custody, according to the petition.
He moved to the United States in 1989 when he was 7 years old, the petition states, when his family was granted asylum based on political persecution in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has three children, according to the ACLU, and is the primary provider for two.
The Department of Homeland Security has been unable to deport Ambila for 18 years, the petition states, because the DRC has no record of him.
In his order Tuesday afternoon, Woodcock said there was still no indication the Democratic Republic of Congo would even accept Ambila and ordered the federal government to halt deportation proceedings.
He cited a 2001 appeals court decision that said if someone who is in custody longer than six months can prove they likely won’t be deported, the government must respond with “evidence sufficient to rebut that.”
“Here, the Petitioner has provided ample support for his belief that there is no significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future based on his and DHS’s failed attempts to obtain a Congolese passport and travel documents necessary for his removal over the eighteen-year history of Mr. Ambila’s removal proceeding,” Woodcock wrote.
Based on that lack of evidence, the judge said Ambila would likely succeed on his claim.
This is not Woodcock’s final ruling on the matter. The federal authorities can still file a response with the court, outlining why he’s still in ICE custody, for the judge to weigh before a permanent order is issued.
Sotoohi said the temporary ruling allows Ambila to maintain contact with his lawyers and it keeps an important legal case alive.
She said it’s common for the federal government to move ICE detainees after a habeas corpus petition has been filed, which sometimes makes it harder for them to challenge their circumstances in court.
A similar move happened in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist whom ICE detained in March. A habeas corpus petition was filed on his behalf in New Jersey, where he was held first, before ICE transferred him to a facility in Louisiana.
