It’s been two weeks since Teodoro Dominguez-Rodriguez and Pablo Aparicio-Marcelino were detained by plainclothes US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials inside the Albemarle County Courthouse.
Honduran national Dominguez-Rodriguez and Aparicio-Marcelino, a Mexican national, were taken into custody in separate interactions on April 22.
As of May 7, both men are being held at Farmville Detention Center, although it’s not immediately clear where they were detained between their arrests and their arrival in Farmville April 24.
They await hearings and possible deportation from the United States.
Some lawyers have raised concerns about the constitutionality of Dominguez-Rodriguez and Aparicio-Marcelino’s detentions. They say that the men were not allowed due process, as constitutionally mandated, and that this case could set a dangerous national precedent, eroding trust in the integrity of the justice system.
Access to legal counsel
“Sadly, people in immigration detention have fewer rights generally, including against detention itself, than people who are being detained on suspicion of crime,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who also works with the Cato Institute.
He said immigration detainees generally have the right to a hearing before deportation and the right to communicate with counsel. However, there is no equivalent to the public defender’s office — publicly funded legal counsel provided to defendants who can’t afford an attorney — in the immigration system.
An official at Farmville Detention Center confirmed that detainees have access to free legal services through the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights. Amica told VPM News that its records didn’t show that the center was representing Dominguez-Rodriguez or Aparicio-Marcelino as of May 7.
Somin said the principle that detainees should be allowed to communicate with counsel “isn't always properly followed, even under more normal administrations than this one.” But President Donald Trump’s administration, he said, “has been making things worse by doing things like deporting people with no due process whatsoever.”
Managing the immigration system without an attorney is difficult, since many people can’t afford an attorney, and documents provided by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services can only be completed in English.
While interpreters are available in immigration court, language barriers can present a real problem for immigrants trying to prepare official documents and understand what relief they’re eligible for.
“People who don't have assets, who don't have money, are going to have to navigate a very complicated system on their own,” said Mary Bauer, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.
“Immigration court makes life and death decisions, right? Many people are there asking for asylum, saying that they would face danger if returned to their home country. And so the idea that someone is not entitled to a lawyer for that kind of high stakes proceeding is very concerning,” said Bauer.
”They’re going to make it harder for them to get due process”
The Daily Progress first published a video depicting one of the detainments, with several people operating cameras in the Albemarle Courthouse’s lobby; VPM News later independently verified it was Dominguez-Rodriguez’s arrest by federal law enforcement.
“The Trump administration has been trying to move people around more than might otherwise be the case. They're going to make it harder for them to get due process and legal representation in the way — and in some cases, they hope to put them within the jurisdiction of courts that they think might be more sympathetic to the administration,” said Somin.
Bauer echoed Somin’s concerns: “I think it's strategic, in that sense, to send somebody to a place where the immigration court denies most requests for relief.”
Kristen Clarens, an immigration attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center, explained that when someone is taken into custody by ICE, others can track their whereabouts using ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System.
“It takes about anywhere between 12 and sometimes up to 36 hours for people to appear on that. It's actually a pretty scary — well, a lot of parts of this process are scary for people, but especially for family members, to not know where the person has been taken at the beginning is stressful,” she said.
“Anybody could show up with a weapon and say that they’re ICE”
Zach Smith, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said in an emailed statement that “it’s good to see that the Trump administration is taking seriously its responsibility to enforce our nation’s immigration laws.”
Smith said state and local officials should assist the administration in its efforts: “At a minimum, these officials may not obstruct federal officials from performing their duties or assist individuals avoid being taken into custody.”
The Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville nonprofit law firm, released a letter to members of the Charlottesville City Council and Albemarle County Board of Supervisors on April 29. The letter said that the detentions “looked much like a public abduction” and that ICE’s announcement of its intentions to prosecute bystanders adds “further insult to this travesty.”
The firm argued that when masked plainclothes officers fail to identify themselves — either verbally or with visible credentials — their tactics “blur the lines between lawful authority and vigilante action, and raise legitimate fears about impersonation, abuse of power, and the erosion of public accountability.”
Mary Bauer, of ACLU, was concerned that without clear documentation verifying the officers’ identity and purpose, the detention looked “perilously like a kidnapping.”
“Anybody could show up with a weapon and say that they're ICE and take someone away,” she said.
The Rutherford Institute also noted that “targeting individuals for enforcement actions at courthouses based on immigration status risks violating the Equal Protection Clause by selectively denying access to justice based on identity.”
Clarens says that it was “bad public policy to conduct enforcement in the way that it was.” She said that large numbers of people in the community have grown concerned about going to court because of the recent detention at the Albemarle County Courthouse.
“People who are there to seek protection from some type of violence or injustice; people who are there as witnesses; people who are there to just pay parking or speeding tickets … If they're not comfortable in those spaces, it leads to an undermining of the justice system,” said Clarens.
Somin noted that he wasn’t a formal expert in this area of law, but repeated many of the same concerns Clarens shared about officers not showing documentation before detentions.
“In a free society, law enforcement officers should be required to show ID and should not act like a police state does. If the law allows them to do that, that shows the law is deeply wrong, and I would argue, actually also unconstitutional under a correct interpretation of the Constitution,” said Somin.
He added: “You get ridiculous anomalies like 4-year-olds ‘representing themselves’ in deportation proceedings. And this is sort of the double standard of immigration, the double standard that we have where immigration policies and detention and deportation is subject to fewer legal constraints than other severe deprivations of liberty.”
The Rutherford Institute called on local officials to “safeguard the community’s constitutional rights and the integrity of the justice system” by affirming courthouse sanctuary; demanding identification and warrants of federal agents; and educating and empowering local residents on their constitutional rights.
