WASHINGTON — Jhonatan Fabricio Taizha Urgiles was walking to his car at 7:15 on a Monday morning when ICE officers asked him for his papers. Four days later, a federal judge in Philadelphia ruled that everything that followed was illegal: the handcuffs, the back seat, and the cell at the Federal Detention Center.
U.S. District Judge Catherine Henry granted his habeas petition on Friday, Oct. 30. She held that ICE arrested him without a warrant and jailed him without an individualized custody determination, which violated both federal immigration law and his due process rights. She ordered his immediate release.
The ruling is about the arrest. The story inside it is about what allegedly happened at the gate of his house. According to the petition, as recounted in Henry’s opinion, an ICE officer threatened to shoot the family dog, tased it, and then attacked Taizha Urgiles’s brother so violently that it broke his leg. At the hospital, doctors said the brother needed surgery. ICE refused it at that time.
The court did not rule on those allegations. It did not have to. The government’s own filing gave the judge enough to free him.
“A rather disturbing manner”
Taizha Urgiles is a native of Ecuador and has lived in Pennsylvania since about 2007. He has two daughters, owns a business, and has no criminal record, according to the opinion. Henry wrote that despite nearly 20 years in the country and a clean record, he was arrested “in a rather disturbing manner.”
The petition lays out the morning this way. Officers approached him and asked whether he had documents. He told them the documents were inside the house. They handcuffed him, put him in a car, and asked whether he was “Jose Guaman.”
He said he was not. He told them only four people lived in the house: himself, his wife, his daughter and his brother.
The officers then told him to call his brother and have him bring out both men’s documents. The brother came out, stayed behind a gate, and handed the papers over.
That is when, according to the petition, an officer walked up to the gate and said they were going to shoot the dog in the yard. The officer tased the dog. Then the officer went after the brother.
Officers put the brother in the back of the car too and drove both men to a hospital. Doctors told the brother he would need surgery. ICE refused surgery at that time. Taizha Urgiles believed that, as of the filing, ICE still had not brought his brother back for the operation.
Taizha Urgiles was booked into detention. No one showed him a warrant. He filed his petition the next day.
A one-page defense
The government’s answer to all of this was one-page long.