(The Daily Signal)—A Barack Obama-appointed judge delivered a blow to the Laken Riley Act, a law that passed with bipartisan support and that prioritizes the arrest of illegal aliens with certain criminal records.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts is the same judge who in July ruled to secure federal taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood after Congress voted to defund the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Talwani ruled late Friday that detaining an individual solely on the basis of his prior arrest record violates due process. The case involved a young illegal immigrant arrested for shoplifting on July 4. The judge focused on the individual case and did not assert the Laken Riley Act itself was unconstitutional.
“The risk of erroneous deprivation of petitioner’s liberty is high where, as discussed above, his detention is based on an arrest for which no charges have been filed and the underlying conduct for which bears no relationship to dangerousness or flight risk,” Talwani wrote in the ruling.
The Laken Riley Act, the first bill President Donald Trump signed into law in his second term, requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest and detain illegal aliens who “commit theft offenses” and also gives states the authority to sue federal officials who refuse to enforce immigration laws. The law is named after Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was murdered by an illegal alien in February 2024.
Under the law, detention is mandatory even if an illegal immigrant wasn’t convicted of a prior arrest.
In this case, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts defended an 18-year-old illegal immigrant who had been arrested as a minor—but was not convicted—for shoplifting. Talwani determined detaining him without a bond hearing under the Laken Riley Act violates his right to due process. She ordered him to be released if a bond hearing is not provided for him by Sept. 10.
The ACLU celebrated the ruling.
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“Courts have been crystal clear that immigration detention must comport with due process and no one in the United States can be deprived of their liberty without any process or justification,” said My Khanh Ngo, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project in a public statement. “The Laken Riley Act is anathema to those constitutional principles, and we are pleased the court recognized this and granted a bond hearing for our client.”
Appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013, Talwani had a controversial record on the bench even before July when she imposed a temporary restraining order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure Medicaid funding continued to be disbursed to Planned Parenthood, which sued to restore its funding after Congress withdrew it.
In April of this year, in a separate immigration case, Talwani blocked the Trump administration from revoking the work permits of 530,000 illegal immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
In June 2023, Talwani sided with a Massachusetts school district to prevent a 12-year-old student from wearing a T-shirt that said, “There are only two genders,” at school.
During the first Trump administration, in June 2019, Talwani issued a decision ordering Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop arresting people at Massachusetts courthouses while they were attending or leaving a courthouse on official court business.
The plaintiff in the case Talwani ruled on Friday, only referred to in court documents as “John Doe,” came to the United States in 2021, when illegal immigrants were flooding the country in the first year of the Biden administration. He was given “special immigrant juvenile status,” which allowed a pathway for young people who were victims of abuse or abandonment to become lawful permanent U.S. residents, according to the ACLU.
The plaintiff was arrested by local police in Massachusetts on July 4 based on an accusation of shoplifting. He was held at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility.
“It is unthinkable to imprison someone in the United States without due process based solely on unproven accusations,” Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts said in a public statement. He added, “The court ruled this violates the law and must cease. Under our Constitution, a person cannot be deprived of their liberty based on unproven accusations.”
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