16 THE QUEENS COURIER • APRIL 25, 2019 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT WWW.QNS.COM
Caban wants to prosecute ICE agents who make court arrests
BY MAX PARROTT
mparrott@qns.com
@QNS
On a frigid evening in late March, Elijah
Stevens, a member of the Democratic
Socialists of America, embarked on
the slow process of door-knocking in
Ridgewood for signatures to get Tiff any
Caban on the ballot of the race for Queens
District Attorney. Standing in the doorway
of a middle-aged Latina constituent,
Stevens launched into the spiel about
Caban’s platform to “stop prosecuting
low-level drug charges” and “decriminalize
poverty.”
Th en he paused. “And she wants stop
ICE agents from showing up at court,”
Stevens said, pulling out a fl ier on the subject.
Th e woman’s ears seemed to perk up.
She proceeded to sign the petition and
invited him to come back to the house to
speak to her daughter who was upstairs,
aft er she was done putting her baby to
sleep.
“So far the ICE thing feels evocative,”
said Stevens. “It’s like, ‘Oh, so now I’m
excited.’ I honestly think we got a few signatures
because of that.”
While the eff ort to stop ICE’s courthouse
raids has become a rallying cry of
progressive Democrats in Albany, and
several candidates in the Queens district
attorney race, Tiff any Caban — a progressive
public defender — poses a solution
that goes one step further than her
challengers: prosecute the federal agents
themselves.
Last week, the Immigrant Defense
Project (IDP) released a report that
showed Queens to be the second highest
borough for ICE courthouse enforcement
Megan Magray for Cabán for Queens
aft er Brooklyn, with 33 arrests in 2018.
ICE’s court operations in New York
state have shot up 1,736 percent since
2016, according to the IDP. For immigrant
survivors of domestic and gender
based violence, a number of trends
correspond to this bump. Th ese trends
include a decrease in orders of protection
against intimate partners, a drop in
survivors seeking assistance at Family
Justice Centers, reduced communication
with law enforcement and increased fear
of compliance with court orders, among
others.
Caban sees the
district attorney
as having a unique
authority to combat
the disproportionate
effect of
ICE’s enforcement
strategies on immigrants
seeking relief
in court.
Stevens put it this
way: “If we believe
in our criminal justice
system — we
believe that it fundamentally
works
— then you would
want people to be
able to show up in
front of a judge.”
Other district
attorney candidates
such as Borough
President Melinda
Katz, general practice
attorney Betty
Lugo and prosecutor
Jose Nieves
have made critical statements about ICE
agents’ court enforcement, but no one else
has proposed prosecuting them.
Caban suggested to QNS that section
195 of the New York State Penal Code
would allow her to enact this policy. Th e
statute defi nes misconduct as occurring
when a public servant as commits “an
unauthorized exercise of his offi cial functions.”
But this raises a big question of interpretation:
what deems a public offi cial’s activity
to be “unauthorized”? To answer this
question, Caban began with two clearcut
examples that she would be looking
out for: excessive force and sexual assault
from ICE offi cers.
“Th at is a crime. Th at’s something that
could be prosecuted,” said Caban. “Even
Larry Krasner has done it with police offi -
cers in Pennsylvania at this point. He’s
been prosecuting police offi cers over their
offi cial oppression statute to deter illegal
stop-and-frisk.”
But she wouldn’t stop there. Caban said
that she would also want to broaden the
meaning of misconduct to include the
very presence of ICE agents at courthouses
across the borough. Even though
she admitted that making this argument
would be an uphill battle in court, she said
she sees it as one that’s worthwhile.
“What’s going to happen with some of
these other things, you get into the land
of appellate stuff and getting the pushback
and it’s about making new case law, creating
new precedent. And you can’t do that
unless you have the fi ght to begin with,”
Caban said.
If the night of canvassing gives any
indication, the residents of Ridgewood, a
neighborhood with a foreign-born population
of 38.9 percent — lower than that of
Queens as a whole at 47.5 percent — were
responsive to this policy.
Caban said the response mirrors her
experience representing immigrant clients
as a public defender. She said she
recalled one client at particular risk for
deportation who would shake and cry
before walking into the courthouse.
“And I couldn’t tell her that she didn’t
have a reason to be scared. So our communities,
I think, recognize how important
this is,” said Caban.
Holden: ‘We must stop preventing ICE from doing its job’
Photo by Mark Hallum
BY MAX PARROTT
mparrott@qns.com
@QNS
Councilman Robert Holden
has railed against the Offi ce of
Court Administration’s (OCA)
directive to require a judicial
warrant from law enforcement
offi cers, specifi cally ICE agents,
in order to enter New York state
courthouses.
Th e order, which was welcomed
by advocates and attorneys at the
Legal Aid Society and Make the
Road New York along with several
prominent candidates in the
race for Queens District Attorney,
would require law enforcement to
identify themselves upon entering
a courthouse, and a judge or
court attorney to review the federal
warrant before they are allowed
to proceed.
“We must stop preventing ICE
from doing its job to protect our
country by limiting their role in
and around courthouses. While
many elected offi cials refuse to
meet with ICE to hear its side
of the story, I have met with the
New York fi eld offi ce and remain
in contact with its directors. Th ey
have explained to me that the vast
majority of arrests at courthouses
are of persons who have criminal
convictions or charges and pending
immigration detainers that
have been ignored by the NYPD,”
wrote Holden.
Holden cited six ICE courthouse
arrests of immigrants who
had prior convictions and charges
including felony drug possession,
sexual abuse, harassment, forcible
touching, criminal possession of a
fi rearm and grand larceny.
He also disputed reports of
ICE’s involvement in city courts,
saying that the New York fi eld
offi ce told him they made just
23 arrests in court houses since
October 2017 until present. On
the other hand, the Immigrant
Defense Project (IDP) reported
33 ICE court arrests in 2018 in
Queens alone.
Janet Sabel, attorney-in-chief of
Th e Legal Aid Society, praised the
OCA for protecting these both
defendants and victims.
“In order for our judicial system
to function properly, all immigrants
– including our clients who
have been accused of a crime, parents
appearing in family court,
and survivors of abuse, among
others – must have unimpeded
access to courts,” she said.
Th e IDP report that contains
that fi gure of Queens ICE arrests
also argues that ICE’s operations
in court deter many immigrant
survivors of domestic abuse from
seeking relief in court. It shows a
decrease in orders of protection
for victims of domestic abuse corresponding
to the rise in ICE’s
courtroom operations in New
York state over the past few years.
Asked how the councilman
would address the negative eff ects
of ICE’s presence in courts on the
victims of such crimes, Holden’s
offi ce responded with skepticism
over the report’s conclusions.
“Data trends that coincide
with each other do not mean
that there is a direct correlation,”
his spokesperson wrote.
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