Lawyers want ICE sanctioned over documents related to Aurora detainee death

Westword (Denver): A group of civil rights lawyers is asking a federal judge to sanction Immigration and Customs Enforcement over its refusal to release a review examining the 2017 death of a detainee at the Aurora detention facility.

On May 23, the Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center, a Denver-based nonprofit law firm, filed the motion asking for the sanction after engaging in over fifteen months of litigation with ICE in the District Court of Colorado. The litigation has mostly focused on compelling ICE to release documents pertaining to the death of Kamyar Samimi, who died while in ICE custody in Aurora in December 2017. ICE finished the Samimi death review, which recently became public, in May 2018, but the federal agency has yet to release it and other documents to the lawyers.

“We’ve had enough of their playing around. It’s inappropriate, especially because the public is seeking accountability and transparency,” says Liz Jordan, a lawyer at the center.

As part of the sanction, Jordan and her colleagues are asking the court to make ICE pay their attorney’s fees for the time spent on this case and to produce documents pertaining to the deaths of Samimi and Vicente Caceres Maradiaga, a Honduran national who died in May 2017 while in ICE custody in California. The group is also pushing ICE to share “policies and protocols that inform decisions on medical and mental health care, accommodations for disabilities, and segregated confinement of detainees.”

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