ICE detainer’s story highlights gaps in due process: NPR

Samantha Surovtsev met her husband, Roman Surovtsev, in 2017 while jet skiing.

When they first started dating, Surovtsev was honest about his past. He told her he had arrived from the former Soviet Union as a refugee when he was four. And that when he was a teenager, his green card was revoked after he pleaded guilty to carjacking and burglary in California.

He explained that after he was released from prison in 2014, he spent time in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody while they tried — and failed — to deport him to Ukraine and Russia.

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

Since then, every year Roman Surovtsev registered with ICE.

In the meantime, the Surovtsevs’ lives followed the path of thousands of immigrants to the United States, considered stateless. They married, had children and started a small commercial painting business in Texas.

Then, one day in early August, what should have been a 10-minute run to a kiosk at the ICE Dallas field office for one of those regular check-ins turned into a 30-minute wait in the parking lot, “praying he wouldn’t get arrested,” his wife told NPR.

“There were tears, simply because we didn’t know what was on the other side of this meeting,” remembers Samantha Surovtsev. Then she got this call: “I freaked out. I freaked out because he was saying, ‘It’s an inmate call.'”

Roman Surovtsev joined the trend of other people being detained during their regular ICE check-ins to meet the administration’s annual goal of deporting one million people.

The “human element”

What makes his case different is that his wife has assembled a team of lawyers on his behalf. Unlike hundreds of other people the Trump administration has pledged to deport as part of its mass deportation goal, Surovtsev has the opportunity to make his case in front of a judge.

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

The Surovtsevs on their wedding day, September 29, 2019.

Credit: Surovtsev family

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Credit: Surovtsev family

According to the Surovtsevs’ lawyers and court records, ICE attempted for a second time to deport Roman to Ukraine, which lacks documents proving his citizenship and could enlist him in armed conflict. In their court filings, his lawyers argue that his new detention is unconstitutional because no changes have been made to facilitate his deportation to his place of birth and that there is “no significant likelihood that Roman will be deported in the reasonably foreseeable future.”

The absurdity of his situation was highlighted at the Bluebonnet, Texas, detention center. The North Texas detention site, which exceeded capacity this summer, also housed Venezuelan migrants.

Surovtsev received deportation travel documents in Ukrainian, according to a court filing from Zachery Hagerty, the deportation officer handling Surovtsev’s processing. Surovtsev, who is fluent in English, does not speak or read Ukrainian.

In court filings, the Justice Department, which defends these cases on behalf of the government, said the new detention was legal because the agency had once again requested new travel documents from Ukraine.

Hagerty, in his statement, said he believed Surovtsev could at least be deported to a third country, if not 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 implications for his immigration status when he initially pleaded guilty as a teenager.

“It’s not a complex 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 shortly, which only makes it even more senseless and absurd that the administration continues to try to deport him to a country for which his deportation would effectively amount to a death sentence.”

Navigating Due Process

In the more than two months that Surovtsev has been in detention, he has missed his wedding anniversary, the birthdays of his wife and daughter, and his mother’s recent health problems. His wife, Samantha, had to cancel about two months of work for their painting company and their two employees are out of work.

Every day, she told NPR, she turns down about five job leads, informing clients that there is a family emergency. Instead, she spent her time working with several attorneys across the country to overturn her husband’s conviction, reinstate his green card and release him from detention.

Immigration advocates have argued that the Trump administration’s rapid approach to increasing arrests and deportations reduces the limits on due process that immigrants enjoy. This due process is intended in part to minimize the chance of errors and to prevent a person from being deported when they may have valid claims to stay, they said.

Lawyers say the Trump administration took steps to undermine due process. Earlier this year, the president said it was not possible for everyone he wants to deport to get a trial.

Immigration officials have been asked to make arrests in court, even as judges have asked immigrants to reconsider their cases. And the Department of Homeland Security has required that immigrants be detained during their processing, with such detention mandatory for those who entered without legal status.

“Yet there are a lot of people in this situation. And several habeas petitions were filed over the summer on very similar facts regarding re-detention,” said Chris Godshall-Bennett, a constitutional and civil rights attorney and another of Surovtsev’s attorneys, referring to the legal route for people to claim their detention is illegal.

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

“The danger here is not just that people are sent somewhere wrong. The danger is that the government is doing it on purpose in a way that ignores these protections,” Lee said. “By ignoring these protections for a subset of individuals, it has opened the door for them to be disregarded. Period.”