Peter Brown insisted to sheriff deputies that he was a citizen and offered a birth certificate, but county officials did nothing to contest ICE’s claim
American citizen Peter Brown received two favorable judgements from U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams last week after being detained for ICE by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office in 2018.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court in that year, claiming Monroe County Sheriff Richard Ramsay unlawfully detained and nearly deported the U.S. citizen.
U.S. Judge Kathleen Williams ruled in favor of Brown on summary judgement on two counts: unconstitutional seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment and false imprisonment.
According to court records, Brown, born in Philadelphia in 1968, turned himself in for a probation violation in 2018 after testing positive for marijuana. His fingerprints were submitted to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which identified him as having a final removal order and he was held by the county to be taken into federal custody.
While in custody, Brown insisted to sheriff deputies that he was a citizen and offered a birth certificate. County officials did nothing to contest ICE’s claim that Brown was not a citizen, Williams wrote.
“Mr. Brown repeatedly informed MCSO of his U.S. citizenship prior to the new arrest and offered documentation of his claims. The Court finds that this is the exact type of information that renders the earlier probable cause determination to be stale, requiring some sort of action on MCSO’s part to verify or inquire about ICE’s probable cause determination.”
The 2018 arrest was the second time Brown had been arrested after being suspected of not being a U.S. citizen. ICE had been looking for someone else named Peter Brown, with a different middle name.
According to court findings, sheriff’s employees routinely accessed a database that identified Brown as a citizen, but did not pass that information on to ICE.
After Brown’s time in jail for the probation violation concluded, he was immediately re-arrested to be held for ICE and potential deportation to Jamaica. He was transported to Krome Detention Center in Miami. Once there, he told ICE agents he was a citizen. The agents checked his birth certificate and arranged for his release.
Brown had called ICE multiple times from county jail, but was unable to get through.
“MCSO could have contacted ICE to investigate Mr. Brown’s claims of citizenship or, if unwilling to do that, released him based on their own records that dissipated probable cause. To hold otherwise would be to permit law enforcement agencies to use the collective knowledge doctrine as both a sword and a shield,” Williams wrote.
That’s a principle that law officers can rely on information provided by other police agencies.
Oral arguments for the case were held on May 15, 2024.
“We have seen the ICE detainer system fail time and again, but the County still chose to put Mr. Brown through this nightmare,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy project director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “At a moment in which we are seeing a raft of unlawful immigration arrests of citizens by federal and local authorities, this decision is a key reminder that the Fourth Amendment safeguards us all.”
In a 26-page partial summary judgement, Williams denied the sheriff’s motion to throw out Brown’s case.
“The Court is not ordering that MCSO cannot comply with ICE detainers and warrants. Instead, the Court’s holding today is simply that, when MCSO possesses information indicating that an individual in MCSO custody is a U.S. Citizen, MCSO cannot abdicate its legal responsibility and turn a blind eye to this information,” Williams wrote.
“The Court merely holds that, MCSO cannot choose to do nothing as they did here.”
This article was republished from the Florida Phoenix Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. You can read the original version here.
