Immigration Raid Witness Faces Deportation

At 7 p.m. Monday, when Washington Colala boards a flight to Ecuador, he’ll take some powerful testimony with him. His lawyers say that’s why the government is having him deported.

Colala (at right in photo) is one of 32 Latino immigrants who were swept up in immigration raids in Fair Haven in 2007. Now, three years later, he’s part of a federal civil rights lawsuit, which argues that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violated his constitutional rights when they came into his apartment on the morning of the raids.

In the midst of that case, ICE has moved aggressively to deport him. Just before Thanksgiving, he was given a deadline to leave the country, Monday, Dec. 6.

Colala has bought a ticket and is ready to fly from JFK to his native Ecuador on Monday night. Meanwhile, law students at Yale are scrambling to find a last-minute exception to keep him in the country.

His lawyers are interpreting the deportation as a tactical move by immigration officials. “ICE officials seek to avoid liability for very serious civil rights violations,” said Mark Pedulla (at left in photo), a student attorney on the case.

Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for ICE, said only, “ICE does not comment on pending litigation.”

On Thursday afternoon, Colala spoke with reporters in a conference room at Yale’s law school. He was joined by student attorneys Pedulla and Rebecca Scholtz, who are working on his case.

After the 2007 raids, Yale students worked with about half of the arrested immigrants to appeal their deportation orders, but not Colala. They argued that the ICE raids had been conducted illegally and were able to overturn the deportation orders for several of their clients, including Colala’s housemate.

They did that with the help of testimony from Colala.

Read More