3 days ago
ICE detains ex-Yale student and refugee in spite of order granting bond and release
An Afghan refugee and former Yale University student continued to be detained by federal immigration authorities on Thursday evening more than two days after an immigration judge issued an order releasing him on bond.
Federal immigration authorities did not respond by Thursday evening to multiple requests for an explanation of the continued detention.
Saifullah J. Khan, who was born in a Pakistani refugee camp after his family was forced from Afghanistan by the Taliban, has had an asylum application pending for 9 years. He was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who hit him with Tasers seven times on May 9 as he and his wife left an immigration hearing in the secure Hartford federal building.
Khan required medical attention after his arrest. according to statements made in court.
In late March, after years of what Khan's lawyers characterized as 'inaction on his asylum application,' he sued in an effort to compel U.S. immigration officials to settles the question. The suit names senior Trump administration figures, including Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
Within weeks of naming Noem and the others, Khan received a notice that ICE had begun proceedings to deport him and he was ordered to appear at the hearing after which he was hit with the Tasers and taken into custody, according to the court filing.
A witness has said Khan was confronted by plain clothes ICE agents who did not identify themselves and was trying to return to Hartford Immigration Judge Theodore Doolittle's courtroom when he was taken into custody.
After his arrest, Khan was held at a detention center in Plymouth, Mass. The order releasing him on $7,500 bond was issued early on May 27. Before his family could post bond, he was transferred to a privately run ICE processing center in Pennsylvania.
It was unclear on what grounds immigration authorities continue to hold Khan in custody. Lawyers who follow immigration matters said enforcement officers have claimed in other cases to have the authority to temporarily hold bond orders in abeyance.
A prosecutor with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration matters, argued against bond, called him a danger to society and a flight risk.
Khan, 32, is married to a U.S. Citizen and has lived in New Haven for more than a decade. He entered the U.S. on a scholarship from Yale in 2012 and applied for asylum in 2016 when he lost his student visa.
The prosecutor called him a flight risk because she said the department had been unable to locate him for seven years preceding his arrest on May 9. According to statements made in court, immigration officials had Khan's address and regularly mailed him notices, including the order to appear in court in Hartford on the day he was arrested.
Khan has no criminal record, but was accused by a Yale classmate of sexually assaulting her after a date in 2015. He was acquitted of all charges after a trial in criminal court. When Yale expelled him in spite of the acquittal after an in-house disciplinary hearing, he sued the school for defamation and related rights violations.
The Supreme Court said the Yale disciplinary process 'lacked a significant number of procedural safeguards … that in judicial proceedings ensure reliability and promote fundamental fairness.' It said Kahn effectively was denied the right to defend himself because the Yale process did not require sworn testimony. The court said he also was denied the right to counsel, the right to cross examine witnesses and the right to call witnesses in his defense.
Yale has tried but so far failed to dismiss the defamation case.
