A crowd of activists protested outside a federal courthouse in Boston on Monday as a judge considered setting bail for three detainees associated with Burlington-based Migrant Justice.
Protesters sang and chanted in gloomy weather. Their voices could be heard inside the courtroom in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building where Judge Paul Gagnon presided.
Gagnon set bail for two of the defendants, Enrique Balcazar, 24, and Zully Palacios, 23, at $2,500. They were expected to post bail and be released on Tuesday morning.
Boston immigration attorney Matt Cameron, who represented the three detainees, argued that their ties to the community, activism work and lack of a criminal record made them eligible for minimal bond.
Cameron also presented the judge with a stack of more than 200 letters on their behalf, including ones from the board of Ben & Jerry’s and a host of citizens.
Still, Gagnon decided that a third defendant, Cesar Alex Carillo, 23, would be held without bond. Carrillo, he said, must be considered a threat to public safety, owing to his misdemeanor DUI arrest in November.
When Gagnon announced the decision, Carrillo’s wife, Lymarie Deida, wept quietly in the first row of the courtroom. Last week, Deida, a U.S. citizen, described to Seven Days how her husband’s arrest had upended her life.
All three have been held in the Strafford County detention facility in Dover, N.H. The detainees were not in court Monday, but participated in the hearings remotely via video teleconferencing from that facility. One by one, they appeared in brown jumpsuits on the flat screen TV in front of the judge.
At one point, muffled songs from outside grew louder and Gagnon paused.
“They’re a little distracting,” he said unsmilingly.
Cameron nodded. “They’re exercising their First Amendment right,” Cameron said. “I appreciate the energy myself.”
As the cases proceeded, Department of Homeland Security attorney Marna Rusher painted all three detainees as a threat to public safety. She described Carrillo’s November DUI citation, which he got after his car ended up off the road and his airbag deployed. According to Rusher, he was too weak to blow in the Breathalyzer, though police were later able to determine that his blood alcohol content was 0.120.
“He certainly is a danger to the community,” she said.
Cameron pointed out that Carrillo had just finished a 14-hour workday at his construction job, and that the charge was later dismissed.
Carrillo had been on his way to a court hearing in Burlington related to his DUI case when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested him. The DUI case was dismissed later that day. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George said that Carrillo had completed a program through the DUI reparative board in exchange for the dismissal. His driver’s license was suspended for three months.
Balcazar and Palacios were charged later that same week. Migrant Justice, which advocates for undocumented workers in Vermont, organized protests in St. Albans, Burlington and Montpelier.
Rusher also argued both Palacios and Balacazar were uncooperative with ICE agents and she called Balcazar “combative and noncompliant.”
Palacios and Balcazar didn’t pull over quickly when ICE attempted a traffic stop, she said. Once they did stop, an ICE officer had to lean over Balcazar to put the car in park and unbuckle his seatbelt. Balcazar refused to get out of the car before he called his attorney, Rusher said.
In the end, Gagnon agreed to lower their bond amounts to $2,500 each, but issued warnings to Palacios and Balcazar. “Be sure not to behave the way you did, because it’s very dangerous for you and officers,” he said, as a translator conveyed the message. “These things don’t get resolved in the street, except, perhaps, sadly.”
Cameron called the situation surrounding the arrests “extremely unusual.”
He contended that Palacios and perhaps Balcazar as well were the “targets of a sustained investigation” by ICE’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit, in spite of the fact that neither has a criminal record. The unit typically targets those with terrorist or gang connections, said Cameron, pointing out that Rusher did not present any explanation why such measures were necessary.
“I am outraged,” Cameron said in a press conference following the hearing. “This was a political arrest and the target is Migrant Justice.”
It wasn’t the outcome Deida had sought for her husband, Carrillo. On the bus ride down, she sat with her 4-year-old daughter and grandmother and fretted. “I’m a bucket of nerves,” she said. “I just hope it ends up okay.”
Before the hearing, Deida mounted a stage in front of the crowd with her daughter clinging on her leg. Through the challenges of the past two weeks, she said, “I was reborn into a warrior.” Then she launched into a chant: “Si se puede!”
Behind her, protesters unfurled a 60-foot poster with the names of 10,000 people who signed a petition for the release of the detainees. The American Civil Liberties Union, various Massachusetts workers and immigrant groups also demonstrated.
Cameron mentioned the protests when he spoke to reporters after the hearing.
“This building has never seen the kind of response being shown,” he said.
For Migrant Justice cofounder and organizer Brendan O’Neill, the protests marked the latest in the organization’s effort to raise awareness and support immigrant workers nationwide.
“We have to keep shining the light on this unfair, broken immigration system,” O’Neill told the protesters. “The net impact of this is it creates a labor force in fear … In Vermont, we’re not going to accept that.”
Migrant Justice workers planned to post the $5,000 bond for Balcazar and Palacios Tuesday morning. An anonymous donor from Massachusetts had agreed to post up to $10,000 in bond through the Pioneer Valley Workers Center in Northampton, Mass., according to Rose Bookbinder, who works with the organization.
The deportation process will proceed for all three. It will be expedited for Carrillo, who remained in custody, though the proceedings can still take months or years.
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It is a sick irony that ICE has a division with the Orwellian name of “Criminal Exploitation Unit”, given the fact that the past few centuries of American foreign policy in Central and South America has been nothing short of Criminal Exploitation. It is those policies of American Imperialism that has stolen land from the local and indigenous populations of those countries, giving it to American and multinational corporations like United Fruit and ITT, for massive plantations and mining operations, while kicking subsistence farmers off their land, paying them paltry wages to work for the corporation, poisoning their land with pesticides that are banned in the US, and oil and mining pollution, and installing and propping up dictatorships and corrupt governments who are sympathetic to the criminal exploitation of the foreign corporate interests. And added to the mix have been the numerous death squad police forces over the decades that have been armed and funded by the US, and trained at the School of the Americas, in the US.
So when the people of these countries we have exploited so criminally try to come here for a better and safer life, we send in the “Criminal Exploitation Unit” to round them up. A truly sick and cruel joke. 1984 was written as a warning for the future, not an instruction manual.
Notice how ICE always goes after migrant workers for violating the laws about undocumented employment, but never imprisons their employers, or the corporate executives who buy the bulk food and dairy products produced with undocumented migrant labor. It is a farce of justice. The truth is our current food systems would collapse without migrant labor. Everyone wants food prices to stay low, while keeping the minimum wage at a non livable level, resulting in not enough American citizens being willing or able to do the hard work on farms for such low pay, poor working conditions, and lack of health care. Based on that reality, it is no wonder the US Dept. of Labor reports that 57% of the entire agricultural workforce in the US is undocumented.
ICE knows they cannot deport every single farm worker. The profiteers of Big Ag won’t stand for it. So they will single out the activists, and some of the workers, as a warning shot to scare others into silence, while serving their other monied interests, the profiteers of the prison/detention industry.
Notice how ICE always goes after migrant workers for violating the laws about undocumented employment, but never imprisons their employers, or the corporate executives who buy the bulk food and dairy products produced with undocumented migrant labor. It is a farce of justice. The truth is our current food systems would collapse without migrant labor. Everyone wants food prices to stay low, while keeping the minimum wage at a non livable level, resulting in not enough American citizens being willing or able to do the hard work on farms for such low pay, poor working conditions, and lack of health care. Based on that reality, it is no wonder the US Dept. of Labor reports that 57% of the entire agricultural workforce in the US is undocumented.
ICE knows they cannot deport every single farm worker. The profiteers of Big Ag won’t stand for it. So they will single out the activists, and some of the workers, as a warning shot to scare others into silence, while serving their other monied interests, the profiteers of the prison/detention industry.
OUTRAGED that Alex Carillo is still being held, without bond! Married to a U.S. citizen, with young child…. Good God, people, where’s the sense in this??
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Finally! Finally! Seven Days has AT LAST provided some facts about the DUI charges in this case. Now we know Carrillo was one and half times the legal limit and went off the road so violently his air bag deployed! His lyin’ lawyer claims Carrillo was tired after a 13 hour day at work! When did Carrillo find the time and energy to get drunk while working that long day!!?? Was he downing Modelos while milking the cows? We also know, as a matter of law, Carrillo had to acknowledge his guilt in order to get the deferred charge and eventual dismissal. In other words, he was guilty and admitted it. Aren’t you relieved your teen driver kid was not driving in the oncoming lane when this selfish little bozo careened off the road? One might think he would do anything to avoid contact with the law as an illegal immigrant. Nope. Says a lot for the ol’ IQ doesn’t it?
“Carrillo, he said, must be considered a threat to public safety, owing to his misdemeanor DUI arrest in November.”
A DUI sticks with you, unfairly so in most cases, and surfaces when it is most inconvenient.
Carrillo broke the LAW..no matter how much you bleeding hearts look at it..He was over the limit for drinking..Wonder if he had smashed into your son/daughter on the road, what then..You’ll say “it;s ok, he didn’t mean to..no you wouldn’t..
There has been millions who have come here illegally..Carrillo has been here long enough to had apply for citizenship..Just because he married an citizen and have a kid doesn’t mean he’s a citizen..You want to stay here do it right..
You don’t get to choose which law you want to obey. no one does..laws were made for a reason..All 3 should be deported , then if you want to come back do it the correct way..Do you think that your butt wouldn’t be thrown in jail in another country..