Beside him stands Justin Cox ’08, a student in the Law School’s Worker and Immigration Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC). When Barrera finishes speaking, Cox begins translating.
“We didn’t know why, but they immediately arrested us and put us in handcuffs. We didn’t know what was going on,” he says.
Barrera begins speaking again, and the cameras continue to roll.
This day marks a milestone not only for Barrera, but also for WIRAC. Cox and other students in the clinic have called this press conference—a year after the arrests of Barrera and ten other Danbury day laborers—to announce that the men popularly known as the “Danbury 11” have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit. With the help of the clinic, nine of the eleven men arrested in September 2006 are suing the City of Danbury, its mayor, several of its police officers, and a number of federal agents for violating the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments. It has taken thousands of hours of research, writing, and phone calls on the part of the students and their supervising professors to get to this day.
Meanwhile, forty miles away, New Haven is embroiled in its own immigration battle. Again at the center of all of the controversy, a group of Yale Law School students and their teachers have spent countless hours meeting with clients, researching legal standing, and drafting requests and memos.
In June 2007, the New Haven Board of Aldermen overwhelmingly endorsed a municipal ID card program that would allow all residents of New Haven—regardless of citizenship—to obtain “Elm City Resident Cards.” Just two days later, in a move Clinical Professor of Law Michael Wishnie ’93 characterizes as retaliatory, federal immigration officers conducted raids, arresting thirty-two people suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Representing nearly thirty of those arrested, WIRAC is alleging that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents used racial profiling to target those arrested and entered homes without warrants or consent. In August 2007, the clinic filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security aimed at discovering how ICE agents coordinated the June raids and the extent of the New Haven Police Department’s involvement in the raids. The clinic has also filed FOIA suits against the Connecticut State Police, U.S. Marshals Service, and U.S. Department of State, all of whose agents, according to ICE, also participated in the New Haven raids.
To read this story in its entirety, visit www.law.yale.edu/ylr.