In response to brazen and unlawful raids by federal agents in the Central Valley last month, Keker, Van Nest & Peters and the ACLU are representing United Farm Workers (UFW) and five Kern County residents in a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Border Patrol to prohibit them from stopping, arresting, and summarily expelling community members from the country using practices that violate the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
In January, Border Patrol agents based at the U.S.-Mexico border traveled over 300 miles to Bakersfield to launch “Operation Return to Sender,” a weeklong operation through predominantly Latine areas of Kern County and the surrounding region.
The operation appears to have been designed to stop, detain, and arrest people of color who appeared to be farmworkers or day laborers, regardless of their actual immigration status or individual circumstances, transport them back to the El Centro Border Patrol Station, and coerce them into “voluntary departure,” a form of summary expulsion which can result in a yearslong bar on reentry to the U.S.
Keker partner Ajay Krishnan spoke with The Recorder about the lawsuit:
“It really is outrageous,” Keker partner Ajay Krishnan said in an interview Thursday.
Plaintiffs allege Border Patrol agents pressured or misled people into signing their names to electronic documents they were not allowed to read, Krishnan said. Some later received documents stating they’d been given versions to read in Spanish, which was not true, he said.
“It seems that Border Patrol officers just lied, just lied to the detainees and said this was for some other purpose, and just asked them to sign something without being clear as to what it was and being deceptive as to what they were signing,” he said.
Krishnan, who said Keker is involved in this suit as part of its long history of pro bono work, encouraged other firms to consider providing similar support to "stop this type of conduct as quickly as possible."
“Firms should be making sure they're fulfilling their obligations to the law by standing up and doing what they can do when they see something that's happening," he said. "That's very much the ethos of our firm.”
He pointed to two previous cases that included Keker: County of Santa Clara v. Trump and Al-Mowafak v. Trump. In the Santa Clara County case, Keker won a nationwide injunction against Trump’s January 2017 executive order that attempted to defund state and local governments deemed to be “sanctuary jurisdictions.” In Al-Mowafak, Keker partnered with the ACLU to file a class action suit challenging Trump's executive order restricting immigration from several predominantly Muslim countries and suspending entry of refugees from all countries.
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