Lawyers for a Cayuga County man flown to Guatemala after an immigration raid at his workplace last year asked a federal judge Tuesday to order the government to bring him back.
Hediberto Ramirez Perez, known as Eddie, was one of several dozen people swept up by federal and local police in a raid on the Nutrition Bar Confections plant in the Cayuga County village of Cato last September. At the time of the raid, Perez lived in Martville with his wife, a United States citizen, and two sons.
Perez came to America in 2005 and was detained on immigration charges in 2018. The arraigning judge found Perez not to be a flight risk, so he was released on bond while his case wound through the immigration legal system. On the day of the raid, Perez held legal authorization to work in the country. He had appealed his case to the Board of Immigration Appeals, hoping to avoid deportation and receive a green card.
This case grows out of the wider class action lawsuit filed last week by lawyers representing several of the workers detained in the raid. As in the larger lawsuit, lawyers argue that the raid was illegal because agents used the wrong warrants, made everyone who looked Latino suspects without individual evidence and that agents were “motivated by discriminatory animus against people of Latino descent and Latino immigrants,” according to the lawsuit.
In Perez’s case, lawyers argue that Perez was denied the opportunity to talk with a lawyer, was never asked about elements that would have allowed him to ask to be released on bond, and was flown quickly out of the country. After his arrest, he was taken to the Oswego Border Patrol office, but was transferred to the federal men’s facility in Batavia that night. The next day, he was flown to a federal facility in McAllen, Texas and the day after that, to Guatemala, where he remains.
In the request for an injunction, lawyers for Perez argue that because he had a case pending in the federal immigration courts and because a judge had freed him on bond, he could not be sent to Guatemala without either his consent or the original judge’s consent.
“Defendants removed Eddie without obtaining a final order of removal or consent to voluntary departure, or letting him speak to his lawyer, or bringing him before an immigration judge,” the injunction request said.
