Dreamer Daniel Ramirez Medina
Daniel Ramirez Medina, a Seattle DACA recipient arrested and detained by ICE more than six weeks ago, was released yesterday:
Medina, 24, greeted his brother — also a participant in the program — in the lobby of the Federal Detention Center in Tacoma, surrounded by lockers and metal detectors.
"He's free to go," a guard told them, and after conferring with one of his lawyers, Ramirez stepped into the sunshine and hugged his brother again for a crowd of news cameras waiting just beyond the chain link-and-barbed wire fence.
Daniel was arrested during an ICE raid targeting his dad last month, despite the fact that Daniel has no criminal record and was thoroughly vetted by DHS in order to be enrolled in DACA, an Obama-era program protecting hundreds of young immigrants like Daniel from deportation. “This is outrageous,” immigrant rights leader Frank Sharry said at the time. “A young man is detained by ICE for what, being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
In the weeks that followed, ICE attempted to criminalize Daniel by falsely claiming he had gang affiliations, with one of Daniel’s attorneys telling "Reuters that ICE agents ‘repeatedly pressured’ Ramirez ‘to falsely admit’ gang affiliation.” The attorney also claimed ICE officials doctored a document in a despicable attempt to frame him, which the attorney called “one of the most serious examples of governmental misconduct that I have come across in my 40 years of practice.”
Advocates have been relentless in their effort to free Daniel, arguing that his arrest, along with that of other Dreamers across the nation, proves that Donald Trump’s recent executive orders are a “full-speed-ahead order to agents to arrest and detain any and all undocumented immigrants they encounter,” despite his claim that his deportation force is targeting only dangerous criminals and “bad hombres” for deportation.
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