For the last five years, Ariel Magaña Linares has been a senior attorney at the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement. CIRA’s goal is “to empower immigrants and refugees to live confidently through high-quality legal representation, resettlement and social work, while creating welcoming communities through education and advocacy,” according to the CIRA website.
The Register had a chance to interview Linares about what students should do if they encounter Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Charli Tobin
What are your basic rights?
Ariel Magaña Linares
Well, first of all, [the] right to remain silent is a big one. It’s really important for folks to say that affirmatively. So, if folks are getting talked to by police, they can ask to either walk away or they can just tell the police, I’m not going to answer your questions. In the state of Nebraska, the only questions you have to answer are questions related to your identity and your address. So, you have to tell them your name and where you live if they ask for it, but that’s all you need to say. You don’t need to give them the country you’re from or any of your immigration history or anything like that. So, the] right to remain silent is going to be the most important one. If you have access to an immigration attorney, make sure you have that information on hand at any given time so that you can ask officers to actually let you use that constitutional right as well to get in contact with an attorney. Finally, you also have the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. That takes a lot more planning that I’m sure you’re going to ask me about, but it’s really important for folks to understand what are some of the spaces in their lives, like physical spaces, where police are restricted from going in without a warrant.
Charli Tobin
What would your advice be if ICE showed up at your house or your place of living?
Ariel Magaña Linares
Yeah, so that kind of gets into folks’ right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. So, what makes a search or seizure reasonable? Most of the time, it’s when police have some sort of warrant. If you think about the home, the home is a very private place. And in order for you to keep that constitutional expectation of privacy, you generally need a warrant signed by a judge before ICE agents can go in there without your consent. A lot of people, unfortunately, give up that constitutional right by just freely consenting to searches in their home. But I would encourage folks to question law enforcement and respectfully ask them to produce a warrant signed by a judge that says that those officers can go into that home.
Charli Tobin
What would your advice be if you were pulled over by ICE?
Ariel Magaña Linares
You have less of an expectation of privacy when you’re on the road, right? You’re completely private in your home. When you’re on the road, your life is very public, right? Anybody can approach you. Anybody can come up to you, ask questions, and you can tell them that you don’t want to interact. The same case applies for law enforcement. So, because you have less of an expectation of privacy, you can still lean on your other constitutional rights, like your right to remain silent, the right to talk to an attorney, to expect due process. So, in the heat of the moment when you’re on the road, don’t get violent, right? Don’t obstruct or resist any arrest or anything like that. The place where you’re going to win the argument about whether your arrest was justified or not isn’t going to be in the heat of the moment. It’s going to be in a courtroom where you can actually assert your defenses.
Charli Tobin
What should you do if you encounter ICE at a protest?
Ariel Magaña Linares
Protests are always scary situations because it’s not just your behavior that you have to look out for. It’s unfortunately the behavior of the rest of the group as well. And protests can get wild very quickly. In protest situations, you still have your otherconstitutional rights. However, there is a sprinkled adage there of a different constitutional right that a lot of people forget about, and that’s your right to peaceably assemble. And so typically if a protest gets crazy and law enforcement needs to crack down on it with a legally valid reason, they have to give protesters an opportunity to peacefully leave the situation. They can’t just round all the people up and treat them all as if they’re part of a problem that’s gone wrong. That’s called kettling, and it violates the First Amendment.
Charli Tobin
If you are detained by ICE, what would be your advice?
Ariel Magaña Linares
Find an attorney. If you do not already have an attorney, find an attorney as soon as you can. Do not sign anything unless you run it by an attorney who can advise you about the consequences of different documents. Unfortunately, a lot of people feel pressure because it might be their first time in custody or because they don’t understand their rights fully. And so, officers will tell them things like, ‘We can make this all go away if you just sign this piece of paper.’ Next thing you know, they’ve signed away all their rights to a hearing or right to assert certain defenses. So, before folks do that, make sure you run it by a professional. Also, here at CIRA, we do have a detainee intake line, so this is specifically for folks who have been detained and are in ICE custody here in Nebraska or in southwest Iowa, they could submit a detainee intake form to our office. Either they can have a family member complete the form and e-mail it to us or bring it in person, or they can call our detainee intake phone number. The phone number for that is 402-884-0876. They can call that detainee hotline, and our folks will do intake on it. And we go ahead and review those individually as attorneys. And we also get together every two weeks to ensure that we haven’tlet anything slip through the cracks.
Charli Tobin
If you cannot afford an attorney, what would your advice be?
Ariel Magaña Linares
In Nebraska and in Southwest Iowa, it might be to contact our detainee intake. So that way we can take a look at the case and see if there’s anything we can do on the bond representation front, on the immigration representation front, or if there’s some sort of avenue for them to go into federal court if they’re being denied a bond hearing so that they can seek a bond hearing. So, CIRA is always a good community resource. ACLU of Nebraska also does similar screening for those sorts of issues. And of course, there’s plenty of private practice immigration firms that do it as well.
Charli Tobin
What would you say would be your advice for a path to citizenship for anyone looking for that?
Ariel Magaña Linares
Yeah, there are so many different avenues for people to obtain some sort of lawful status and ultimately become citizens. The problem is that a lot of these avenues have bureaucratic bumps, if you will. There’s other ways that I would characterize them, but unfortunately, while people can Google and find so many different paths that make sense on paper, in practice, these pathways effectively don’t exist for a lot of people. So, asylum applications, unfortunately, are adjudicated at a very negative rate, especially here in the Omaha Immigration Court. For people seeking to immigrate lawfully, maybe they have a brother or sister who’s a U.S. citizen and they want to come to the United States to join them. We’re talking about wait times that exceed several decades. So, on paper, you can see there are probably multiple ways for somebody to fix their status in the US, but in practice, these options are quite limited.
