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Somali 92: Courage Amid Chaos

Posted on Jun 20 2019

Mirella Ceja-Orozco was on the phone with her client about 11 p.m. on December 5, 2017. By 2 or 3 a.m., he was shackled to a seat in a plane heading for Somalia, a country he had not seen since fleeing sixteen years earlier, as a teenager.

Ceja-Orozco had represented this client—we’ll call him R—for two years. “We probably spoke five days a week, including weekends,  while he was detained,” she recalls. “That’s how invested he and I were as client and attorney.”

The deportation flight, with 92 Somali immigrants on board, landed in Senegal, not in Somalia, sat on the ground for a while, and then headed back to Florida, for reasons that are still not clear.

When the plane landed in Florida, R had a broken finger, bruising, and a possible sub-orbital fracture. He had been beaten on the airplane, he told her, though not as badly as some of the others. He saw one man on the plane so severely beaten that he passed out. During their 46 hours on the plane, detainees were denied food, water, medication, even access to bathrooms. R recalls receiving one 16 ounce bottle of water and some slices of bread when the plane took off, but nothing else during 46 hours on the plane.

The flight became international news, and the names and photos of some of the Somali 92 were published in the media. As R spoke out about ICE agents’ abuse of immigrants shackled on the plane, his photo was published in a newspaper in Somalia.

When R called Ceja-Orozco and told her what happened to him and what he witnessed on the plane, she called Ben Caspar at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she taught as an adjunct professor. Her call and others sparked a class action lawsuit that would eventually involve multiple attorneys and legal organizations in multiple states, in a case that became known as the Somali 92. The class action asked that individuals on the flight be allowed to reopen their cases, based on changed circumstances: the publicity surrounding the flight had focused attention on them and their lives would be in danger if they were sent back to Somalia.

R and the rest of the Somali 92 were forced onto that deportation flight as a direct result of Trump administration deportation policies. When Trump became president, he made deportation a policy priority. He ordered that any immigrant eligible for deportation must be deported. The administration began pressuring the governments of Somalia and other countries that did not accept deportees. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began jailing immigrants when they showed up for regular check-ins, and holding them in jail indefinitely. While some of the Somali 92 on that flight had criminal records, many were targeted simply because of prior. orders of removal because of lost asylum claims, changes in status, or similar circumstances.

R had an order of removal for about ten years. He was allowed to continue working and supporting his family as long as he checked in with the U.S. immigration office every six months.  He was taken into custody when he went to a regular six-month check-in.

For years before 2017, the United States did not deport anyone to Somalia because the country had no government and no way to accept deportees back into the chaos and violence of civil war. Because he could not be deported when he was detained at his check-in, R was held in  Irwin County Jail in Ocilla, Georgia and then transferred to LaSalle Detention Center in Louisiana. After the flight returned from Senegal, he was held briefly in the Krome Detention Center in Florida.

Then he was transferred from Krome Detention Center to Glades Detention Center in Florida, and immigration officials told Ceja-Orozco that his case would be transferred to a Florida immigration court. Instead, in the middle of the night, he was transferred back to Irwin Detention Center in Georgia. When Ceja-Orozco called Glades Detention Center the next day, she was told that no one knew where he was. Maybe, they said, he had been deported. “There were a few hours of panic,” she recalls, “and then he was in Georgia.”

Ceja-Orozco flew to Georgia to visit R. The Irwin Detention Center is located in Ocilla, more than a three-hour drive from Atlanta and the home town of Jefferson Davis. At the federal courthouse in Atlanta, an ICE agent warned her:  “Make sure you leave before dark, because you’re Latina. You don’t look it, but just make sure you leave before dark. Try to avoid pulling over until you get closer to the city.”

Ceja-Orozco drove through forests and past what once were plantations. ” I couldn’t help but visualize scenes of people running and hiding and trying to escape slavery,” she said. “It was such an eerie feeling and vibe—coupled with my imagination and what the ICE agent had told me at the courthouse. I thought: my client is black, he’s Muslim, and he’s here.”

She visited R three times, and experienced no hostility or rudeness. But, she says, “I always left before dark.”

In June 2018, 14 months after he was first detained, a court granted bond to R, allowing him to leave immigration detention while his case makes its way through the system. He and his family now live in Minnesota, and Ceja-Orozco continues to represent him.

“I remember the day that he got bond,” she says. “I cried. I’ve never cried in open court, and I cried—tears were coming down my face. There was such a relief. I felt that I didn’t care if I never practice again—I got him bond.”

When Ceja-Orozco began representing R, she was an attorney in private practice. By the time that the Somali 92 class action was filed, she was working pro bono, as the cost of representation mounted beyond anything her client could pay. When she came to work at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, R became a client of ILCM and she continued to represent him.

“I never would have been able to do it all by myself,” Ceja-Orozco says. “Thankfully, ILCM allowed me to keep it as a pro bono case—there’s no way my client and his wife could have continued the fight if they had to pay for it. I was lucky and my client was lucky that we had support from the University of Minnesota Law School, and the entire litigation team that gathered to support and represent the Somali 92.

“That for me also epitomizes how awesome the immigration bar is, because they jumped in, not fully knowing how deep it would go or how crazy it would get, but saying. ‘How can I help you?’ and actually meaning it, not just saying it as a formality.”

After months of litigation, the class action was finally resolved in 2019. Immigrants who had been on that flight were either allowed relief by reopening their cases or opted out or were denied relief.

“It’s one of the cases that has defined my career,” Ceja-Orozco says. “The convolutedness, the overwhelmngness of it all epitomized what the Trump administration has done to the profession. I started practicing immigration law under the Obama administration, with DACA and welcoming people and having them become part of the salad bowl. Now it’s ‘No. You are different.’ instead of welcome. This case defines that change for me as a practitioner. I never had gray hair until this case.”

 

Ceja-Orozco and the rest of the Somali 92 team have been honored with the  The Advocates for Human Rights award, which will be presented at the Advocates’ annual awards dinner on June 20, and with  the 2019 Arthur C. Helton Memorial Human Rights Award at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida on the same day.