Calling his detention by immigration officials “unnecessarily cruel,” a Manhattan judge on Monday freed an immigrant-rights activist — saying anyone subject to deportation deserves “the freedom to say goodbye.”
Thunderous applause followed from supporters who packed the federal courthouse’s largest room.
Judge Katherine Forrest said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were technically within their rights to deport Ravi Ragbir to his native Trinidad over a 2001 fraud conviction.
But the feds stomped on his constitutional right to due process and deprived him of “the most essential aspects of life, liberty and family” when ICE detained him without letting him say goodbye to his American wife and daughter, she said, adding, “There is, and ought to be in this great country, the freedom to say goodbye.”
Ragbir, a 27-year US resident living in Brooklyn, is executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City. He was initially granted permanent residency in 1994, but that was revoked after his fraud conviction.
Ragbir has since “lived the life of a redeemed man,” Forrest said.
“It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes.
“We are not that country; and woe be the day that we become that country under a fiction that laws allow it,” Forrest said. “The Constitution commands better.”
Ragbir was ordered deported in 2006, but officials have stayed his deportation four times since.
ICE agents arrested him on Jan. 11 during a routine check-in with the agency, several days before his last stay of deportation was set to lapse.
His lawyers argued that the deputy director of ICE’s New York office, Scott Mechkowski, unfairly targeted Ragbir because his New Sanctuary Coalition protested outside of Mechkowski’s office.
Assistant US Attorney Brandon Waterman called that “speculation,” but Forrest nonetheless noted the argument “with grave concern,” the judgment states.
Ragbir’s wife, Amy Gottlieb, said outside the courthouse that she was moved “by the judge’s powerful language about what it means to live in a democracy.”
Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-Brooklyn) is bringing Gottlieb as her guest to President Trump’s State of the Union Address Tuesday.