The Biden administration agreed to settle a lawsuit allowing for the reopening of a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in California where toxic chemicals were allegedly used on detainees and basic civil rights were allegedly denied en masse, with nearly a dozen prisoners dying at the center between 2011 and 2020, when it was closed amid protests and lawsuits from immigration activists, Law and Crime reports. The settlement agreement calls for the reopening of the Adelanto ICE Processing Center after motions were filed to lift a COVID-19-related “intake ban” that was implemented by a judge in 2020 over the spread of the virus as part of a class-action lawsuit brought against the facility in April 2020 over its treatment of prisoners, with detainees named as plaintiffs. DOJ prosecutors moved to vacate the intake ban in a Dec. 23 filing, calling for the preliminary injunction issued in 2020 — which barred “new detainee intakes” and later led officials to weigh the financial costs of staying open with pending litigation — to be tossed out. The settlement agreement was announced in a motion filed by the plaintiffs, one of whom was Kelvin Hernandez Roman, a Garden Grove father who claimed to have been improperly detained and held at Adelanto for nine months over tinted windows
“I was afraid for my future and the future of my family, and I was left in the dark when turned over to ICE by the very deputies who swore to protect our community,” Hernandez Roman told KABC in 2020. His lawyer, Monica Ramirez Almadani, said he could have been released the same day of his arrest because ICE agents did not show up on time, but authorities chose to wait and kept him locked up until the agents arrived. "There were no criminal charges against Kelvin and so he should have been released earlier in the day and at a minimum should have been released that night with the other individuals who were being released,” Ramirez Almadani said. “But instead he was held, put in a holding cell and had to wait several hours for ICE to pick him up. If ICE doesn’t show up on time, then that person must be released and ICE here did not show up to pick him up earlier in the day.” The decision to remove the ban on new detainees at Adelanto comes as President-elect Trump pushes form mass deportations in the U.S. to kick off his second term.
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