Beacon Hill Republicans are lining up in their crosshairs a seven-year-old court decision that bars law enforcement in Massachusetts from detaining people based solely on suspected civil immigration violations just as President Donald Trump is attempting to enact mass deportations.
Critics argue the July 2017 ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) provides “sanctuary” protections to undocumented immigrants in Massachusetts but supporters say it does not impede the work of federal immigration officers and sets clear boundaries.
Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition State Government Affairs Director Amy Grunder said the ruling, known as the Lunn decision, is drawing scrutiny because President Donald Trump is targeting “sanctuary cities and sanctuary states.”
“These laws, even though people call them sanctuary laws, they do not provide sanctuary from enforcement of our criminal laws,” Grunder told the Herald. “And they certainly don’t provide sanctuary to people from (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). ICE has jurisdiction to be anywhere in a public space in Massachusetts and nothing about Lunn changes that.”
In a 34-page decision, SJC justices wrote that local law enforcement do not have the power to hold someone only on the basis of a civil immigration detainer issued by federal officials beyond the time they would otherwise be released from custody.
The ruling means law enforcement must release people from their custody even if federal immigration authorities issue a civil immigration detainer.
The detainers ask local authorities to hold someone for up to two days after they would otherwise be entitled to release in order to allow federal officials to arrive and take the person into their custody for removal proceedings.
Multiple conservatives on Beacon Hill have filed legislation that would hand local law enforcement the authority to hold people on a civil immigration detainer just as the Legislature is gearing up for a larger debate around the interaction between police and federal officers.
Sarah Sherman-Stokes, a Boston University law professor and associate director of the university’s Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic, said the ruling does not prohibit federal officials from enforcing U.S. immigration laws.
The decision instead says that local authorities do not have the inherent authority to arrest someone based on an ICE detainer, she said. Civil immigration detainers are issued without a judicial warrant and they do not require probable cause, she said.
“It’s like a letter to Santa — ‘we wish you would hold this person for us,’” Sherman-Stokes said in an interview. “But courts don’t have to do that. That doesn’t mean that ICE can’t enforce its laws in all the other myriad ways that it engages in enforcement, it just means that this one particular way is off the table.”
Removing someone from the United States is a civil, not a criminal, matter, which makes federal immigration detainers civil in nature, justices wrote in the ruling.
The removal process is not a criminal prosecution and detainers are not criminal arrest warrants, the justices said.
“They do not charge anyone with a crime, indicate that anyone has been charged with a crime, or ask that anyone be detained in order that he or she can be prosecuted for a crime,” the ruling said. “Detainers like this are used to detain individuals because the federal authorities believe that they are civilly removable from the country.”
Justices said that holding someone on a civil immigration detainer, against their will, constitutes an arrest under Massachusetts law.
“We conclude that nothing in the statutes or common law of Massachusetts authorizes court officers to make a civil arrest in these circumstances,” the ruling said.
The court did not decide whether arrests based on civil immigration detainers, if they were authorized by state law, would be permissible under the U.S. Constitution or the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.
That left the door open for future clarification if the Legislature decided to pass a law modifying the Lunn decision, said Grunder of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Coalition.
“They did say … we’re not answering this now but if the Legislature decides to create such a statute, we will then consider whether it violates the U.S. Constitution or the Massachusetts Constitution,” Grunder said.
And the Supreme Judicial Court did not block Beacon Hill lawmakers from further defining the ruling.
“The prudent course is not for this court to create, and attempt to define, some new authority for court officers to arrest that heretofore has been unrecognized and undefined. The better course is for us to defer to the Legislature to establish and carefully define that authority if the Legislature wishes that to be the law of this commonwealth,” the justices wrote in the decision.
The case stemmed from the experience of Sreynuon Lunn, who was arraigned in a Boston court in October 2016 on a single count of unarmed robbery.
The day before his arraignment, federal immigration officials issued a civil immigration detainer against him.
His case was later dismissed for lack of prosecution, leaving Lunn with no criminal charges pending against him in Massachusetts. But a judge declined to release him after Lunn’s lawyer brought up the civil immigration detainer.
Instead, Lunn remained in state custody for at least several hours before federal immigration officials arrived at the courthouse and took him into their custody, according to the Supreme Judicial Court ruling.
The next morning Lunn’s lawyer filed a legal challenge in county court that alleged the trial court and its court officers had no authority to hold him on the federal immigration detainer after the criminal case against him had been dismissed, according to the ruling
The lawyer also argued that Lunn’s rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and Articles 12 and 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights had been violated.
Even though Lunn was already in federal custody at that point, the SJC took up the matter “recognizing that the petition raised important, recurring, and time-sensitive legal issues that would likely evade review in future cases,” according to the 2017 ruling.