Suffolk County taxpayers could be on the hook for $60 million in a migrant class-action lawsuit for holding on to illegal immigrants until the feds could show up and ship them out of the country, officials said Wednesday.
A federal judge ruled that the sheriff’s office in the Long Island county acted on its own when it held undocumented immigrants for deportation proceedings — because New York State law doesn’t allow local cops to do so.
Adding insult to injury, the judge says the feds won’t have to chip in to pay off the hefty ruling — even though they’re the ones who wanted the migrants held in the first place.
“This is one of those things that makes me shake my head,” Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine said at a press conference Wednesday. “We have a lot of ways to spend $60 million — but it’s not paying back illegal immigrants, many of whom are here on criminal charges for violating our laws.
“Taxpayers are liable for honoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — who asked us to detain prisoners who were here unlawfully in the United States,” Romaine said.
“We honored the requests of ICE and Homeland Security to detain these prisoners so they can be processed and, I assume, be deported by ICE,” the county executive said. “We are now being sued for detaining them at the request of the federal government.”
Filed in 2017 in the name of two migrants — but representing a class of hundreds — the suit sought damages because the plaintiffs were held by Suffolk County until federal immigration agents could show up and take them into custody for civil deportation proceedings.
In his 36-page ruling Thursday, US District Judge William Kuntz said the county violated the constitutional rights of the migrants because state law didn’t authorize the sheriff to hold them.
“New York itself has stated that the [federal] cooperation provision … does not apply here and would in fact be inconsistent with state law,” Kuntz wrote. “Whether a local law enforcement agency assists ICE in the apprehension of aliens pursuant to the [Immigration and Nationality Act] is voluntary.
“The statute itself only contemplates such assistance where it is ‘consistent with state and local law,’” the judge wrote. “Where, as here, the law of the state prohibits the conduct that the cooperation subsection contemplates, that subsection cannot reasonably be interpreted as applying.”
Kuntz added that the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office “was acting without the federal statutory authority.”
In a brief filed on behalf of the migrants in the lawsuit in April, state Attorney General Letitia James wrote that detaining an immigrant for deportation “is unauthorized by state law.
“Contrary to the contention of the defendants and the United States, federal law does not independently authorize state or local officers to make the civil immigration arrests at issue here,” she wrote.
In a statement Wednesday, lawyers for the immigrants in the class-action suit said the feds should also be on the hook for the ruling in the case, and not just the county.
“The federal defendants were earlier voluntarily dismissed without prejudice and that current decision has nothing whatsoever to do with whether their conduct is legal or not,” LatinoJustice wrote.