Updated at 4:37 p.m.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont has filed legal claims on behalf of two people who were inside the South Burlington home raided by federal immigration agents on March 11.
The claims allege that agents violated the rights of Johana Patin Patin, an asylum seeker from Ecuador who was detained in the raid, and José Estrada Jerez, a teenage U.S. citizen born in Honduras who was inside the home but not taken into custody.
Both are seeking financial compensation under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a federal law that allows private individuals to sue the federal government for monetary damages when harmed by the negligence of federal employees.
The law requires victims to first submit an administrative claim to the government, which the ACLU filed last week. The government now has six months to respond before the case can be filed in federal court.
Monica Allard, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Vermont, said she could not share the specific damages being sought. Estrada Jerez’s claims revolve around the use of excessive force, she said, and Patin Patin’s claim revolves around her unlawful imprisonment.
In an interview with Seven Days after the raid, Estrada Jerez said he was left with bruises after an ICE agent picked him up by his arms, threw him on his stomach and handcuffed him. Agents then confiscated his U.S. passport and cellphone, he said.
Two other individuals in the home — Camila Patin Patin and Christian Jerez Andrade — were detained in the raid. Neither has made claims at this point.
The complaints are part of a “coordinated effort to hold the federal government accountable for its lawless immigration enforcement campaign,” the ACLU said in a press release on Wednesday. The effort includes 54 complaints filed by 17 ACLU affiliates and their partners around the country.
U.S. law makes it difficult to sue federal agents individually, but the torts law offers another avenue to hold the government accountable, Allard said in an interview.
“We’ve seen this approach be successful in other contexts, but something of this scale is really rare,” Allard said. “We want to use all the tools at our disposal because accountability is elusive here.”
Reached on Wednesday, an ICE spokesperson said the agency would not comment on pending litigation.
In a translated statement, Johana Patin Patin said she and her family have built a life in Vermont since they arrived in the U.S. in 2023.
“We work hard, we pay taxes, and our children go to school here,” the statement read. “I hope that people who hear my story will understand that no one should live in fear that the government will separate them from their children, physically harm them, or throw them in prison based only on false stereotypes about immigrants and people from Spanish-speaking countries. I think the people of Vermont would agree that we all deserve better.”
Patin Patin was one of three people detained on March 11 after a chaotic, daylong standoff between federal ICE agents and local police and hundreds of protesters attempting to block agents from entering the home.
ICE agents had been looking for a Mexican man who was in the country illegally and had recently been charged with drunken driving in Middlebury. On the morning of March 11, they were staking out a Dorset Street home and watched two men get into a car registered to the Mexican man.
When the agents attempted to stop the car, the driver allegedly sped off, turning into oncoming traffic on Dorset Street and crashing into a minivan before both passengers ran out of the car and back into the house from which they came.
Hours later, with a search warrant signed by a federal judge, a SWAT-style team of federal agents broke down the door with a battering ram in search of the Mexican man. A tactical team of Vermont State Police troopers helped clear a pathway for the federal agents to enter the house while other local police agencies managed the angry crowd.
But the man agents were looking for was not inside, nor was he in the vehicle earlier in the day. Jerez Andrade had been driving the car with his teenage nephew, Estrada Jerez, in the passenger seat. Neither has been charged criminally for the car crashes or for fleeing the scene of the crash.
After failing to find the man they were looking for, agents detained the three noncitizens they found in the home, none of whom were the initial targets.
In the days that followed, all three were released from detention after filing habeas corpus petitions in federal court that claimed their detentions were unconstitutional.
In Patin Patin’s case, a federal judge ruled that her due process rights under the Fifth Amendment were violated when federal agents detained her without access to a bond hearing and despite her pending application for asylum.
In his order, U.S. District Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford said his court had to consider the “extraordinary context” in which her arrest took place, during a campaign of “mass detention for immigrants despite the constitutional limitations on civil detention.”
Patin Patin represented one of many individuals caught in the government’s net who were “not specific targets for enforcement,” he wrote. “Rather, their arrests are the product of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
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