What ICE Doesn’t Want You to Know

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Bert Martinez:
I tell you what I find fascinating. Usually immigration lawyers are kind of below the radar. Nobody hears about it, you know, unless it’s a fabulous case. Now, immigration lawyers have been thrusted into the limelight, right? You guys have become like the defense lawyers fighting. Not, you know, fight. Really, in this case, fighting a corrupt government.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau :
Yeah, exactly. And like. Like my roots, I mean, I’m a criminal defense lawyer to the core. That’s how I started out. So to me, this was an easy transition because, right, you go from being the fender, getting screamed at by a judge, you know, representing, you know, societies, you know, downtrodden and cast away, and now it’s like the only crime people committed, for the most part, is wanting a better life, right? So when they label, like, you know, they play this game and label my clients the criminal illegal immigrant, I’m like, I’m a criminal defense lawyer. Let’s. Let’s go through that chapter and verse, and they don’t have a leg to stand on.

Bert Martinez:
Well, and you know what? And I remember when Trump was in the office, Trump’s first term, I remember this guy, this immigrant who was grabbed by ice. He was. He had a. I think a felony when he was like, 16 or something, maybe 17 for pot, which, you know, 20 years later is not even a real thing now. But either way, they try to deport him. He’s a doctor. He is a doctor embedded in his community. And it seems like part of what they’re doing is they’ll grab whoever, right? And then, okay, you know, you’re a US Citizen.

Bert Martinez:
Okay, you can go there. You’re a green card holder. Well, we’re going to hold you a little bit longer. And then if you have no status at all, then you go to a different section. But whether or not they find a. A shred of criminal element from, again, 15, whatever, 10, 15, 20 years ago, they seem to hold on to you for 90 days and then release you.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, I mean, that’s one thing they do, and the other thing that’s, you know, equally disturbing. I mean, I’ve had a lot of cases recently. I think I had five that were kind of viral in the last month, month and a half.

Bert Martinez:
Wow.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Like, we have one client, Jamie Rosa. First name is J E M M Y. Mispronounced Jamie. So this is a woman had a green card for 40 years, and she went away with her kids. A big family reunion that went to Cancun.

Bert Martinez:
Okay.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Her husband worked 11 years for the Department of Homeland Security. So they come back to Logan Airport. This is the Third case I’ve had. It’s been an absolute nightmare dealing with the airport, this particular administration. So they’re flying in and they go online and she shows her passports from Peru. She has her green card. It was renewed a month before the trip. It’s been renewed every time since she was 8 years old.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And when she was a 20 year old college student, she had a bag of weed. Like, who had in that a bag of weed? Were there a 20 year old or you didn’t have it, your roommate did. Or, you know, it’s like it’s not even a crime in Massachusetts anymore. And it went from being decriminalized to being legalized under state law. Now obviously it can violate federal immigration laws, but our governor a year and a half ago did a press conference and just pardoned everybody who had a possession charge that included her. You didn’t even need to apply for the certificate. You could get one if you needed to prove you were pardoned, Right? But by operation law, she had a pardon. So imagine this, like you can get pardoned for raiding the capital.

And whether you agree with it or not, only a president can pardon a federal crime, right? Just like only a governor can pardon a state crime. So it’s supposed to be treated equally under the law, full faith and credit. So she travels knowing it’s pardoned. Her record was sealed for 12 years under state law, so nobody should have had access to it. You go to the courthouse, they just act. I’m like, who is this person? She doesn’t have a case here. And what happened to her? She traveled back, she was put in this, like, back room and her husband was in there. And they just kind of hinted at, hey, what happened in 2003? And she’s like, what are you talking about? 22 years ago, what are you talking about? I was in college then.

And then they were like, you sure you didn’t have a problem in, you know, a court? And she’s like, oh, that. She goes, that’s pardon. That’s been dismissed. That’s not on my record anymore. You just redo my green card. And then that was it. They held her at the airport for five days. That first night, she got rushed to the emergency room.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
She’s having an anxiety attack. She has high blood pressure, she has a whole assortment of medical issues, right? And her husband kept. Her husband got one phone call from the nurse. The nurse let her borrow the cell phone. So she called her husband, freaking out, like, I don’t know what’s going on, but it doesn’t look like they’re ever releasing me. I’m at the hospital. So she goes back to Logan. That next morning, her husband comes in my office completely distraught, telling what’s going on, how he’s worked for Homeland Security, how they have these high level security clearances.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know, his brother has a similar one, how they’ve been travel. She’s traveled multiple times out of the country, no issues at all. Had a green card since she’s eight. She came here legally. She’s not the proverbial legal immigrant that everyone talks about. She came here lawfully and traveled for years, no issues at all. Traveled when Trump was president the first time. And what they always did for people like this with green cards, where there might have been a minor criminal issue, is they would give you what’s called deferred inspection.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They would let you go through the airport, they’d hold on to your green card, say, go talk to a lawyer, here’s a piece of paper, come back, we’re going to continue the inspection process, you know, in a month or whatever. They give you time to talk to an attorney.

Bert Martinez:
Right?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
What happened to her is he couldn’t even talk to his wife. We call the airport, they blow us off. Like they claim you don’t have a right to counsel when you’re at the threshold of entering the country. So Customs and Border Protection, this is protection at all. They hold you basically at the threshold of the country and then say you can’t access an attorney, you can’t make any phone calls, you can’t talk to your family. We don’t really necessarily care about your medical conditions. You just stay here. And we’ve had clients pressured into deporting themselves.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
We had a few people that traveled early in January when Trump was president, didn’t talk to us. And then we learned like a month later, they’re in Brazil, Guatemala. What the hell are you guys doing? You’ve got a green card for 20 years. They left the. They got forced out of the country because they couldn’t call a lawyer and they just disappeared. So she’s there. She already has one trip to the Mass General Hospital. We sued on Tuesday afternoon.

Within a few hours of hiring us, we filed an emergency habeas corpus in federal court in Boston. We have a hotline we can call after power. So what happens when you do these cases, and this is relevant to Ani Lopez, we talk about a bit is a judge issues a temporary order. So it’s basically protect the status quo. It’s like somebody’s complaining My rights are being violated by the federal government. The federal government has to justify the detention. You can only do that at a court hearing. So the judge will say, look, don’t transfer the person from the Massachusetts court system, the district, and then more importantly, do not deport the person from the United States till they have the day in court.

And then this is blasted to the district, the U.S. attorney’s Office of Civil Division, they have an on call duty attorney. They have on call clerks and on call judges. So we’re filing this at 10 o’ clock at night. We’re filing them on the 4th of July, Mother’s Day. We’ve had people arrested 247 by this administration.

So we, so we file it for her. This is Tuesday night, Wednesday night, still don’t know why she’s there. We’re calling the airport, they’re not letting us talk to her. It got to the point where on Thursday I sent three associate attorneys over to the court. I have this on video, I mean, over to the, to the Logan Airport, you know, where the deferred inspection is. And it’s like going like the Alamo. The guy’s just standing there like this and he’s like, you know, trust me, she’s back here. We’ll let her know she has a lawyer.

We’ll tell her anything you want her to know. I’m being fully transparent here, but she’s still an inspection. So I’m like, literally it took you four days to inspect her. Like, you should know instantly why you’re holding somebody. If liberty is the norm, not the exception in the United States. And she’s held for four days. And we literally handed them another popular lawsuit in case they didn’t realize they were sued in federal court 48 hours ago. And we had a letter demanding her immediate release from custody.

We said, you don’t have a lawful basis for holding her. If it’s just marijuana charge, it’s been pardoned. Here’s all the reasons why you can’t use it against her. There’s no way it could be that. But if it is, you have no basis for holding her. And if there is a reason for holding her, at a minimum, let us know what the hell it is.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And please let her into the United States so we can deal with this in a courtroom. Summons her, give us the first do something. So he takes the document and then at one point he yells it to my associate, says, turn the phone off. Which is a violation of the First Amendment. It’s actually a violation of A federal case we have in the First Circuit Court of Appeals. So it was a colleague of mine in law school actually got arrested recording the police beating a guy, a homeless person up in Boston Common. He took his case all the way to the First Circuit and won. They said he.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They said he was violating the wiretap statute by recording a police officer. Assault, stalking, somebody believe. Yeah, he got arrested, he got processed. This guy actually wanted to be a criminal prosecutor, of all people. They arrested this guy, Simon Glick. This case is a big deal around here because of who he was, right? He was a law and order guy who got his own rights violated. And that was, you know, like, that must have been like 15 years ago. So they act down, like, turn your phone off.

You can’t record us. He gets all pissy and then he goes back in the room. So we never talked to our client. This is day four that night. I’m going home. I call the husband. His name is Marcel Rosa. Wonderful guy.

He’s just. He’s an actual absolute rock star on the camera. He’s a man’s man, everything you ever want. Your neighbor and a husband and a brother in law. He’s just an awesome dude. And he’s like, what? I was like, yeah, I have three lawyers there. They’re acting like this. There’s no constitution in this country.

They wouldn’t talk to us. They wouldn’t let us talk to Jamie. We don’t know what. What the F’s going on here? And then he gets a missed call from cbp. He’s like, oh, they’re calling. I’m like, oh, gee, maybe they woke the hell up because the lawyers were there, right? So the guy gets on the phone and he’s talking to him, blowing smoke up his ass. He’s like, look, your wife’s going to go tomorrow to Plymouth County Jail. I knew that was false because there’s no beds in Massachusetts for a woman.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So something odd. Odd here, right? And he’s just saying all this stuff. And at one point I said, excuse me, sir, I’m their lawyer and I just sent three lawyers down to the airport. We’ve sued you in federal court. She has health conditions. You’re not even letting her get her medication. You’re not allowing me to talk to her. You’re not allowing us to even see her, to even know she’s there.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And you’re saying, trust us, she’s there. She’s already gone to the hospital once, right? His answer is, basically, I’m not talking to a lawyer. At one point, I yelled at him. I don’t know if we can swear on the show or not, but absolutely. I mean, I was like, listen, I said, you better fucking let her out of the jail right now. I said, enough is enough. You’re my first witness in federal court. You almost killed her and let her out now. And I just. I’ve never lost it like this before. This case bothered me. And I was like, this is outrageous.

Bert Martinez:
Right?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And then he. He hung up the phone.

Bert Martinez:
I mean, the fact that somebody, an official is going to say, I. I’m not going to talk to a lawyer, that to me. That to me is just ringing all sorts of alarms.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Well, this isn’t the first time this is happening. I keep so. So with her. So then. So this is like, how crazy is. That’s Thursday night. So then the next morning’s Friday. I get an email from the U.S. attorney that’s like, look, we don’t have beds in Massachusetts. I’m like, yeah, I knew that, but.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You don’t have at the airport either. So this is day five now. Is she still an inspection. So the fifth day of inspecting somebody who’s had a green card for 40 years that was inspected every time you applied to renew it. And a month before the trip, they knew who she was. It’s in her fingerprints. Never did a damn thing. Never tried to deport her once.

Never gave her a problem at the airport. Held her there. So she gets transferred to me. I’m in New Jersey that Friday. I remember calling Marcel, like, 5:30pm and it was like, have you heard from her yet? He goes, she called me, like, really briefly, but she said she’s on route to Maine. He gets a call from a 207 area code. Well, that’s my hometown. I’m from Lewiston, Maine.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So I’m like, all right, that’s Maine. They give me a call. He picks up the phone. She sounds so traumatized. And then I talk to her, and she’s like, who are you? I was like, I’m your lawyer. We sued three, you know, three, four days ago. They didn’t tell you at a lawyer? She goes, no, they never told me I had a lawyer. They took me to the ice facility before I went to Maine.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They never told me you. You were my lawyer. They never told me there was a lawsuit. I thought I was actually getting deported from Maine. When they shipped me to Maine, I had no idea whatsoever was going on. She sounds like somebody who’d just been like. Like, I worked with trauma victims, like asylum cases. She just, she total ptsd.

She’s telling us this stuff. So Monday, like that day, like I reached out to the prosecutor’s office in Roxbury Court. It’s like a section of Boston and they’re just like I said, I need to go to court on this, this old pot case because I’m guessing this is why she’s detained. They still haven’t given her written charges on day five. Wow. Yeah. We go to the court and the judge gives me an emergency hearing at 2 o’ clock in the afternoon. We filed the motion like Friday by email and the prosecutor literally dropped it off at the court for me and said, look, I’ll get you a hearing next week, but the judges are on vacation.

It’s like the last week about around mid August. A lot of the court’s slower around here because of the weather.

Bert Martinez:
Sure.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
A lot of people are, you know, vacationing, whatever. So they’re like, I don’t know if the judge is in that week, but we’ll see what we can do. Two o’ clock in the afternoon. So I go to two o’ clock in the afternoon. I like 50 of the family members there and I just, I mean I have this recorded somewhere, but I, I just went on, I was like, judge, we’re in America. Clients sitting in Boston now she’s in Maine. We don’t, I don’t know why she’s detained. And I have to guess that it’s this pardon pot charge.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
She possessed maybe a joint of weed in 2003 as a 20 year old college student. I’m guessing this is why she’s there. I only talked to her one time. She didn’t even know she had a lawyer. And I went through the police report and everything. The police report didn’t have a quantity of marijuana listed at all. I mean, I don’t know how the government could have prove she was guilty then. They didn’t even write down the amount.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It was never tested at a lab. It was just kind of like a big joke. Like you’re, you know, you’re not a citizen, we’re not giving you any. Just take probation, call it a day. It was a fineable offense. The most she could have got was six months at a county jail. If she was like the worst miscreant known to man. Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They didn’t, you know, they didn’t do that with her. She just did like a little bit of probation, moved on, life sealed the record. It was pardoned one day. It was decriminalized lived her life, has four children that are citizens. A husband’s a citizen, and he was from Roxbury originally. He was literally like, I got ambushed in my own hometown. I was told to be worried, you know, worry about all the fentanyl dealers and drug traffickers and rapists and criminals in Mexico. And he goes, I had the vacation of my life and I got ambushed in my hometown.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I worked for these people for 11 years. They didn’t even do me a solid and let my wife in and let me talk to a lawyer.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They bullshitted around about why she was detained. So I still didn’t know she’s a detained. When I’m in the criminal court, the judge is like astounded. He had his head down at one point. He’s like, I was like her lawyer then. Never gave her any immigration advice. It wasn’t required in Massachusetts then. That’s an area I specialize in, is vacating convictions for people that might have had these, weren’t given advice.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And now it affects their immigration status in some way. But 2003, that wasn’t the standard here. 2010, a Supreme Court case came out called Padilla v. Kentucky that basically made that right a constitutional right. Your lawyer has to give you some immigration advice before you plead guilty or go to trial. But then I won a case I was part of in 2013 that made that right go retroactive back to 1997 and for all crimes in 96 for drug crimes exclusively. So we have all these. We have like a 13 year window of all these cases where unless you were an immigration lawyer, the odds are you didn’t give proper immigration advice to any non citizen defendant.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So there’s so many of these people that I represent where they’re traveling, they’re getting arrested at their citizenship. They just don’t know because their lawyers never gave them the advice. The judge had to give a proper warning about immigration consequences. A lot of them just didn’t do it then. So her case really fell into this pattern. And then when it was the district attorney’s turn, she basically was like, look, judge, this isn’t even a crime today, first of all. But she said, I don’t even know how we proved it was a crime then.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Because there’s no quantity of marijuana listed. She said, there’s no sufficient basis to even plead guilty. This makes no sense at all. She goes, absolutely. And the judge is like, all your rights were violated. I’m tossing the case.

Bert Martinez:
Wow.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So then the next day, I basically file a motion with the federal judge explaining how we’ve been sandbagged from the beginning, how we’re now on week number two. We still don’t have any proof at all for why she’s detained. She’s in a different state, 100 over 100 miles away from my office. She has no idea what the hell’s going on. She’s never been charged with anything yet? No, no. Written, big, beautiful bill. They can’t print three pieces of paper to say, here’s what your charges are, here’s where your court is.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know, here are your rights. That’s what a notice to appears. They didn’t give her one of those at all. I have written requests for it like multiple times. The U.S. attorney is aware that I’ve never seen these charges, like, what the hell are you holding her on? So then I filed like a motion for her immediate release from costing. I just went through chapter and verse how they were screwing around here, like how, you know, they detained her. There was appears to be no lawful basis for it.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And if it was a mystery pot charge, guess what? I just vacated the charge. Here’s the proof. And then, by the way, judge, three lawyers from my office went to the airport and this is what happened. Denying her access to counsel, due process of law, the whole, you know, nine yards, right? So then when I file it, instead of having a hearing, the U.S. attorney basically emails and says, oh, I, I got the email. We told ICE counsel that the drug charge doesn’t exist anymore and they’re canceling her notice to appear. And I responded. I was like, I just talked to my client 10 minutes ago on the phone.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
She’s still never seen a notice to appear and neither of us her lawyer. And then like an hour later, they basically tell the judge they’re letting her out of jail and they’ll coordinate my office. Three hours later, somebody in the press kind of calls us. It’s like, I heard your client’s getting out soon. Well, she’s in Maine. That’s like two hours, two and a half hours away, maybe with traffic. Right. It was pouring rain that day.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So we all jumped into a car and I went out there with three, you know, three or four of my staff members. You know, they kind of knew what she was looking like. But. But the day before, and this is what was heart wrenching, her daughter turned six. So I had my first video conference of her in my office and she came and I have this on video too. She, she walked in, I was talking to the, you know, Jamie, Rosa. She had no idea her family was here. And then they all walked in and we were all in tears.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And she’s like saying happy birthday to her six year old in a stranger’s law office. Imagine this child, she’s going to remember this for the rest of her life. Some stranger, you know, like I’m talking to you right now. She’s talking to an iPad, to her mom who’s in a freaking prison jumpsuit in a civil immigration enforcement system, right? Never, never even charged with anything. So then it just gets worse. This case is a prey to horribles. We go to pick her up and the press is there and they’re like, where’s your client? And I’m like, I have no idea. Ice closes around 4:30.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
We’re all sitting in the parking lot looking for her. Her husband lives 30 miles south of Boston. He’s got three kids he’s going to pick up. So he’s scrambling to get his kids. I used to historically always call a lawyer and be like, look, your client’s going to get out around, you know, five, six. They don’t want you, you know, camping out all day. I mean, I get it. Security, just like they give you a heads up.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They said, look who’s going to pick your client up. She’ll probably be here between, you know, five and six, something like that. Common courtesy. They don’t do that anymore. So they literally kicked her out in the pouring rain. She looks like a trauma victim. She can’t even talk. She’s a mile down the road in a Burlington mall.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s a big shopping mall, stumbling around. Some stranger at the Cheesecake Factory lent her the cell phone and she’s calling her husband saying, I don’t even know where I am. She’s from the South Shore of Boston. She’s like an hour and a half, you know, drive away from here. She doesn’t know this area, right? She’s like walking around all disheveled. She’s got a plastic bag with her. They get like a plastic baggie and throw a shed in it, right? And then the woman in my office knew what she looked like. They went to the mall to find her while I was standing there in case maybe she walked back.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And they bring her back and she gets out of the car and she just goes over. She’s just hugging her children and hugging her. She couldn’t even stand up. She couldn’t even function. She didn’t even know who I was, I think, I mean, she was that traumatized. And then they did a press Conference and I just went off. I lost my a bit. But I was like, we demand justice for Jamie.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I just said that, right? And I said, wow, what an idea. That led to us co founding. My firm sponsors it. We have a legal clinic called mass deportation defense. It’s.org.com but the concept behind that was when Jamie finally spoke publicly, she said she wanted to be a voice for the voices. So when she was in Maine, there’s rats running around, they’re banging on the doors at night, trying to, you know, slamming the doors, leaving the lights on, making it cold. You hear all these things time and time again. Her story was featured a few three or four Sundays ago, was front page opinion piece done by Sarah Wildman and Francesca Triani.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They did a whole expose on this shit show of how they treat lawful permanent residents. One of the people is an asylum seeker. He said he was tortured back home and he was treated worse than the United States, believe it or not. It’s so deplorable what they did. But then we didn’t even know this when Jamie got out. She told us that Thursday when we had the altercation at the airport, they literally took her to the hospital a second time. Her blood pressure was almost 200. They handcuffed her a fucking bed and told the nurse not to call her pain in the ass husband again.

And at one point her husband kept calling to give medication to her, right? The supervisor said at one point he goes, sir, listen, your next at kin will let you know if she dies. And he laughed at him on the phone and hung up. And that’s what they did to somebody at a green card since the age of 8 years old and never, you.

Bert Martinez:
Know, here’s the deal. Even, even if this person, you know, whatever, there, there is a certain level of just being decent. So let’s just say that your client didn’t have a green car for whatever reason it lapsed or whatever. There’s still what happened just to being human. There’s nothing wrong with letting you see your lawyer or let’s get her the medicine.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Exactly.

Bert Martinez:
To be so cruel as to say, hey, we’ll notify you if she dies. It’s what is the point?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s unconscionable. You can deport somebody with dignity. You don’t even have to detain a person to deport them. That’s what’s always conflated. Now let’s just arrest everybody and deport them. Like they used to give some called a bag and baggage letter. They literally say, look, show up at the airport at 2 o’, clock, bring your suitcase. They go there, they see you leave, you can kiss your good ones, your loved ones, goodbye.

Like deportation doesn’t require being detained. And all it is is you’re detained. And you know, nearly every client of mine, they always wind up in a for profit hellhole down south. Now, let’s just talk about Logan Airport. So a few weeks back, I was down in the French Quarter visiting. I have clients detained there because that’s where they end up last. That’s where Bruno Ferreira just was detained. You.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
We could talk about her in a second, but she, Ava Mendez, this is a Rhode island based case. She’s. She’s had her green card, same thing as Jamie, age of 8, but she was a little older. Jamie was 42 when she was traveling. Ava Eva Mendez was 48 years old. A victim of bad circumstances. Her mom was in Cape Verde. Her dad turned out to not be a very good person.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
She wound up in foster care with her sister. Her sister wound up in Massachusetts. Foster care, she wound up in Rhode Island. Her sister, for whatever reason, became a citizen because the foster care system took better care of her. Rhode Island, I guess failed to do it, or I don’t know the process there, but she just thought she was a citizen and then later in life realized she wasn’t. She’s been with her, her husband since he was 16 years old. They have six U.S. citizen children together.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
She’s had the same job for 12 years. A year ago, she, her boss, she took her on a cruise to you, but you bought her like, hey, go on a cruise, go to Bermuda, Bahamas, you know, saying that, you know, Kokomo, you know, she’s like doing a trip, comes back, no big deal. She hardworking woman. She had been in the immigration court system over a decade ago. They gave us, because in 96, she had a couple of like shoplifting charges and they gave her forgiveness for it. And then she had another one, like 2007, like a no contest plea. She didn’t contest the charges.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And she’d been traveling with no issues. And to double down, I’m literally at Saturday in the French Quarter. I’m there, check my emergency answering service. And it’s like, my loved one’s been detained since Tuesday night at Logan Airport. And I’m like, well, what are the odds she’s still there, right? But I get my staff out of bed, they all, they get pissed at me a lot. It’s like, okay, tell your boyfriend he’s gonna, he’s gonna Chill out a while, Grab your laptop and let’s bang on another habeas. So we literally. We file one in a few hours.

I’m editing it while I’m eating one of those baguette, you know, one of the. The bayonets or beignet. I was eating a beignet at the cafe Dumont. I’m sitting there like powdered sugar on my face like, okay, sue the. Right. So then we. We sue them again and we get the emergency order not to transfer this, that and the other. So following Tuesday was Veterans day.

Her husband comes into my office. He gets all the paperwork from the Rhode island court. I read it in like three minutes. I’m like, there’s no basis at all to detain her at the airport. The crimes from 96 can’t be retroactively inadmissible. Vartellis, behold, that’s a U. S. Supreme Court case.

They should know about this damn thing. And I know they messed it up before because I mentioned it to them, like, you can’t use prior charges against somebody. I knew she had an immigration court.

Bert Martinez:
Also. I want to insert this, though. It seems to me that if you. Whether you’re represented by a lawyer or you’re bear by yourself, if you don’t know this case law, if you don’t know your rights, they’re going to trample over you.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Oh, absolutely. They don’t know. They don’t know the law. I don’t think they care to follow it. So. So what happens with her? So while he’s in my office, guess what? CBP calls again. I’m like, oh, great, let’s talk to these fucking idiots again. So he puts it on the speakerphone and he’s talking to them like, sir, can you bring her a change of clothes? She’s been here a week.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I’m like, oh, yeah, we’re on week number two now. She still. I said, I’m a lawyer. Can I talk to you about this is. Sorry, I’m not talking to a lawyer. I said, well, why is she there? It’s been a week. I’m not talking to Laura. I said, okay, listen, you’re number one in my witness list.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I’ve already sued you. We’re going to talk in federal court then. Have a good day. So this is Tuesday. So now come Friday, still hasn’t been charged. She’s still sitting there. I have Congress, congressman from Rhode island, ammo reaching out to me. They’re all like, what the hell is going on? I said, this makes no sense at all.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Because she’s not inadmissible for what happened in 96. And the charge from 2009 is a petty offense. Shoplifting. It’s called petty offense. Exception. It’s. You’re allowed to be admitted to the country for that. So legally I had no idea what the hell they were doing.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And the basis of our habeas was even if she might have had one of these minor charges because it’s so long ago, it’s a due process violation to put somebody in mandatory detention without an opportunity to be heard. Because again, Liberty is the norm. She’s not dangerous. She’s not a fight risk. Danger and flight risk are the twin pillars for detaining a person in the immigration system as well as the criminal system. Right. So she’s, she’s still there. So Friday night, told the U.S. attorney the problem we have here, I know if it’s a problem or a solution, but you can’t just file motions without conferring with your opponent. They want you to try to work it out yourself. So I basically email, I said, look, I’m going to file a special motion now. We’re on week two. I have an email to talk to my client and the guys tell me, I’m not talking to you. You can’t talk to your client. He hasn’t. She hasn’t talked to her husband or her sister just ghosting us.

So he goes, okay, I’ll foreign a call the next morning. So 9:00am or whatever the. They call me from CBP and it’s the supervisor. I know his name. I’ve dealt with him years or not fram. I know his name’s like, yeah, you’ve been a long time. He used to give me information before. And I was like, look, why are you holding her? I can’t answer any questions.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It sounds like, you know, Robo. I can’t answer any questions. Counselor, I’m just going to let you talk to her. So I talked to her. I recorded the whole call and it was, it was sad. I learned that, you know, she went to Cape Verde not to surprise anyone. Her brother died. So she went, she had her first trip home to go bury her brother and she saw her mom for the first time.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So. So it’s just like horrible. But yeah, at the end of the day, she got to see her mom, she got to see some extended relatives. It was a pretty good trip. And she was coming back to go see the birth of her first grandchild and she missed that first. Her. One of her daughters is in college for the first time missing that event, and she’s still sitting there. And now this.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
This clown show that they have. They’ve literally now claimed that they actually admitted her to the United States, which I know is false, because they held her at the airport for two weeks. Now they’re trying to say she’s deportable rather than inadmissible. There’s the concepts in the law. When you’re seeking admission, if you don’t have a green card, you’re not really seeking admission, but if you have minor criminal offenses, you’re treated as, like, a candidate for admission. And you could be put in. You can be put in a deportation process. As a arriving alien seeking admission, that’s like a box they check off.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
But arriving aliens aren’t eligible for bond and bail in the immigration court. That’s why I went to do the habeas, because I. Because I thought, just constitutionally, can you detain a person who had a shoplifting charge from 20 years ago? It just doesn’t make sense that you’re dangerous. And Boston judges have accepted that argument. But. So that was like, just. That’s me knowing the law, figuring, like, I’m guessing what they’re going to do, because, again, they haven’t told me why they’re charging it. Just like Jamie Rosa.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Same game, right? No Britain charge. Now they’re. Now they’re charging her, basically saying that they’re using against her the charges from 96 that they already forgave her for in the last immigration proceeding. They tried pulling this on, like, 20 years ago, and now they’re trying to resurrect the petty offense shoplifting charge, but the charging of being deportable. So they’re basically claiming that after they held her for two weeks, they just passed her onto ice, and now ICE is trying to deport her. Deportation is for people caught within the interior, whereas the admissibility is when you’re traveling to reenter the country. That’s the distinction. So Jamie Rosa was seeking admission, just like Eva Mendez.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They should have been charged of being inadmissible. It doesn’t take weeks to inspect somebody. They almost killed Jamie. After five days. They kept. They doubled down and kept there for 13 or 14 days and then charged her incorrectly. And she’s still in jail because we had a court hearing. The government said it wasn’t ready two weeks ago.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And, you know, they just kick it down the road.

Bert Martinez:
And in a case like this, I know that in. And again, I’m not a lawyer, but in criminal cases, you have a Right To a speedy trial. But I imagine that you don’t have that right in a. In a immigration hearing situation.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
No, in the immigration court. I mean, for better or worse. I mean, for worse, really. But it’s not a real court. People think it is, like, it is an administrative agency. It’s no different than going like the Tax Bureau or like the Board of Zone Zoning, Board of Appeals. It’s an agency created by government that processes immigration cases. So every immigration judge in America, in theory, works for the Attorney General of the United States.

That’s the boss. And every attorney works for the Department of Homeland Security Secretary. So Christine Ohm controls the prosecutors, and Pam Bondi, these days controls the judges. And what you’re seeing now, which you’ve never seen before, is they’re literally firing judges, saying, this is a Biden, Obama, left, liberal judge, or this is a Democrat. This person’s too lenient. This person had a background in actually helping immigrants, and we’re gonna. You know. So they’re just, like, literally firing the judges.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Right.

Bert Martinez:
I think Trump just fired nine or 10 or 12 more just within the last seven, 10 days.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Well, even in Boston, they created a subsidiary court called Chelmsford. It’s like the North Shore suburbs. It took, like, a year to build this court. They hired, like, 26 judges. They got really 24 of them. Wow. So the whole point is, like, we want to deport more people. Well, you need more judges.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You need more prosecutors. Right. But then they got rid of, like, 90% of the court after it just was created. Why? Because they’re Biden judges. I mean, they’re judges. I mean, they’re not all. I mean, some of them work for the Homeland Security department for, like, 15, 20 years. These are. These are public servants.

Bert Martinez:
And on top of that, I think you have to kind of wait and verify that a judge is being biased or is not following the rule of law. But let me ask you this, because it doesn’t make sense to me. On one hand, you know, the Trump administration wants to deport as many people as humanly possible as quickly as possible, but at the same time, he is firing immigration judges. Like I said, he just fired nine or 10 or 12 of them. And then your case there, where you’re telling me what he did with this other court. So it seems like if he really wants to speed things up, you would, like you mentioned, you’d get more judges, not have less, because now you’re gonna have a backlog of people.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, it’s just a sign of what we’re seeing is that’s assuming you want to follow the law.

Bert Martinez:
Gotcha.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Let’s take, let’s take, let’s talk about Ani Lopez right now. Yeah, let’s, yeah, let’s talk about another airport catastrophe. So I got the, like, I think I’m a client for punishment. I have trouble saying no to people. But you know what?

Bert Martinez:
Well, but I think that when you are being a, in this line of work, you go from being a prosecutor to a defense to now an immigrant specialist. You are, you know, you are there to help people. I mean that’s kind of, you know, it’s hard, especially in a case where you have somebody who’s, for those of you guys who don’t know, a 19 year old college student on her way home, somebody who’s here legally and all of a sudden she gets nab. So let’s talk about this.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, so this is an absolute unconstitutional bag job. This is what happened here. It’s like it was like, like my, my days haven’t been like this lately. Last few months, it’s a lot of 12, 15 hour days. And that was when I started my career. You got to pay your dues and now you have a bunch of associates running around. Now they’re not even sleeping. Everyone here is.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Look, you know, we look like we need a V8. You know, it’s like, holy, this stuff is like daunting. It’s not made for everybody. It wears my staff out. They take sure mental health days. It’s like, it’s almost like working in a minefield where like you hold your breath and like some days nobody gets their legs blown off and then other days every, you know, body parts everywhere. That’s what it feels like. It’s like people just walk in.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You feel the trauma when you’re talking to them. Nine times out of 10, you’re not even talking to the person who’s detained. It’s their loved ones. They’re like, where’s my dad? Where’s my brother? Where’s my, you know, it has to.

Bert Martinez:
Be very frustrating because as a lawyer you’re used to following the rules, you know, set before the court or the whatever. And so now back to your landmine analogy. There it is, a landmine because you don’t know what you’re dealing with. We’ve had cases where the judges says bring this person back and ice or the Trump administration say what person? And they don’t.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, I found a, you know, like a lot of stuff like I’ve been telling people like Traveling at the airport, it’s like a game of Maga roulette. That’s really what it is these days. Because Honey’s the first case I’ve seen where somebody was detained, not even leaving the country. So I thought at first she was like an F1 student. Maybe she had a green card. Because I got the case 10 o’ clock at night. So I had like a 12 hour day. And then I got asked, I actually got asked to do like a training session for Young, the Younger Lawyers group of the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s New England chapter in Boston.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So I went over there and then after, there’s some guest speakers that I knew, yeah, I’ve been out for. It was just hanging out a bit. You know, I had some cheap beer and cheese. You know, just got an event, saw some of my colleagues, went home, and I’m literally walking downstairs in the parking garage. I get a text. It’s like, todd, you another place at the airport? Are you interested? It’s a college student. I’m like, what the hell is this? I drove home, I email my staff as they call me. Like 20 minutes.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, I get there looking at it, but like, was she traveling in? We couldn’t really get a lot of information. Her dad didn’t really know what was going on because her dad had no freaking idea she was visiting him. The mom, the parents didn’t know. This was supposed to be a surprise trip. So what we learned, like, close to midnight, she showed up as being in the custody of ice, whereas what CBP does is you’re not. You don’t show up in the custody at all when you’re in cbp. So all those clients I’ve had held at the airport, if you try looking them up, it’s like they don’t exist. So imagine your loved one goes to Colombia or something for a vacation, and then you go to pick them up at the airport and you just have no idea, like, where the hell are they? You might think they got killed in another country.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Maybe they’re, you know, in a prison. Right. You know, who knows? Maybe they got injured. You can’t even get information from the government about where your loved one is. They’ll literally like deport somebody, not even tell you, and treat it like they never had you in custody, even though you’re sitting in handcuffs in a holding cell at an airport somewhere.

Bert Martinez:
Well, let me ask you this. In Mrs. Lopez’s case again, he did.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Did.

Bert Martinez:
What was the trigger? Do you know what was the trigger?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Because, yeah, I figured I Figured it out like. Like, just, you know, like procedurally. What was going on with her is at eight years old, she came in with her mom from Honduras. They fled persecution. Their whole town got overthrown by gangs. And what the situation was then, is it like she’s studying. She was studying business at Babson University. Like, let’s say you owned a business.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You have to pay extortion to the gangs, right? Or they’ll. They’ll harm your loved one or they’ll kill you. If you’re a young, pretty girl, they’re like, okay, our gang member wants you to be his girlfriend, or they want you to be a prostitute. Like, you’re basically the boys. They want to recruit for gangs and the girls, they wanted to be girlfriends. Or, you know, worst case scenario, like, they treat them like sex workers. And it’s just. It’s like, it’s just lawless.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s a lawless society. But at the airport society, they come here to seek a better life. And then she’s labeled a criminal illegal immigrant. She came here with her mom to seek a legal process called asylum. It’s based on treaties and statutes. It’s lawful. See, if you go to the border and they’re like, what are you doing here? And you’re like, oh, I want to work with my cousin in Boston. You get what’s called expedited or removal.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You don’t have a valid case, you automatically get deported. There’s limited due process. At the threshold of entering the kanji, this has gone to the Supreme Court. So people like that, if the case sucks, basically they’re caught, they’re automatically deported, they’re sent back. Right? But when, when he was seeking asylum, you have a fear for your life. They give you an interview. So they detain you in the interview briefly to see if you have a valid claim, and then you’re released to pursue it. That’s what happened to her and her mom.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So they were released to pursue a valid process.

Bert Martinez:
In this scenario, when you are seeking asylum, are you given a permit, a letter, something that says, hey, I’m here legally and I’m seeking asylum?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
No, it’s a little different than that. So what they were given is a document called the notice to appear. And this is significant for her case. I’ll talk about it in a second here.

Bert Martinez:
Okay.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So they’re given a notice to appear at the immigration court. It was in the Houston area. They live in Austin. So they go to this proceeding. So she’s 9 years old, and it ends when she’s around 11 years old. And I looked her up in the database. Every non citizen has an A number. It’s like a Social Security number.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s like your file number called an alien registration number. So every case has an A and then it has like an eight or nine digit code. So all I have access to is I can type it in on a computer and then it should show you were ordered removed. Boston Immigration Court. You lost your appeal. You know, you won your case. It gives you very limited information, but it’s at least an investigative, investigative tool, right? So when I typed it in for her, it said, no information found. It’s weird, I’m like, well if she was ordered removed, it should be in this database.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
The government’s claiming she has a removal. But this is what’s messed up about her case is Thursday night we didn’t. I don’t just try to wake charges up out of bed all the time. Like I’ll file it at midnight if I need to. But it showed she was in ICE custody. So I was like, phew, she’s not detained at the airport anymore. I thought she was coming in now. She was in ice, Custies.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
We had a little bit of time to deal with it, so. And just knowing the flight patterns around here, they use secret military jets, that’s another thing. They have two Air force bases, Mass, in New Hampshire. They’re using these secret military jets to fly people. All the women seem to end up in Vermont and then down in Louisiana, and the men seem to wind up in Buffalo and then Texas. Okay, so that’s the. And, and those are both for profit prisons down south. So what happened with her is she was a nice custody around, you know, early Friday morning, like 12:30am we look, she was still there.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
We woke up the next morning to recalibrate, talk to her dad, got more information. And then during the course of the day, we emailed ICE and we called up. They don’t answer their fucking phones and they don’t respond to their emails. And we sent an email says, where her lawyer? So appearance of counsel form. We need to talk to her. We call, they don’t answer. These have a number of lawyers can call. And they would answer the phone.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You say, look, what’s going on? Why is my client there? They won’t let you visit your client now. They don’t even let you go there. They treat it like it’s this fortress, right? They’re holding people there for weeks on end. It’s only supposed to hold a person there for like 12 hours. Just like the airport. There’s, there’s federal regulations on how long you can hold something. Detention at an airport or at the ICE facility. It’s just a processing center.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s like the police station. Don’t keep the people at the police station for six months. You bring them there and you let them post bail. You send them to a jail somewhere.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
ICE has always been that way. And they just, now they’re very secretive. So they. So before we’re ready to file her case, they delete her from the database. So it looks like she’s not in the United States anymore.

Bert Martinez:
Wow.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And then when we talked to her dad, her dad only talked to her on Thursday. So this is now Friday. And she got arrested around 5am her flight I think was at 5:30am Thursday. So we didn’t get the case till like 10:30 at night. And then we were working on it Friday. And then we don’t know where our client is, we can’t talk to her. And I acknowledge in the email, so then her dad, we talked to her dad, I don’t know, like late afternoon. And he’s crying and he’s like, she’s been deported.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So he said to us, he’s been deported. And we’re like, you know, a 19 year old just got deported. We couldn’t stop it. And. But I’m doing the math. I’m like, well, last time you heard from, I was like, maybe the plane’s flying over the United States. Let’s file it. Anyway, I just, what the hell.

We did the work. We, we go on the computer, we boom, we make a phone call, we’ll be filed an emergency. Hey, so six o’, clock, it’s docking. It’s 608. A judge issues in order not to transfer her from Massachusetts. I didn’t know for sure she was in Mass. But more importantly, do not deport her from the 50 states without a court hearing. Basically, it’s a stay order.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s to protect the status quo, to allow you to go to court. Right. So this will be like if you, you think like some bulldozer is going to show up and blow up your house, right? You, you go to court, you’re like, they’re trying to destroy my house. And the judge says, stop everything, let’s go to court. Let’s see if the construction crew can legally do this. Let’s see if the government can take your property. Judges throughout the country issue these protective orders to maintain the status quo. Like you might lose your case, but you’re at least to have you at least get your day in court.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
That’s due process of law, right? So what happens here is we just think. We think she’s deported because her dad said she’s been deported. I haven’t heard from her. We filed it. We didn’t hear from them all weekend. Monday, talking to Nicole Dill in my office, he’s my associate, helps utilize. I’m like, nicole, we heard from the dad? Like, no. Well, we call him, you know, hey, Francis, you know, you hear from Honey, he’s like, yeah, she got deported.

And we’re like, oh, man, that sucks. Well, when did you hear from her? Well, she called me Saturday because she got flown from Texas to Honduras. And I was like, why? I almost fell out of my chest. What the. What do you mean, Saturday? You sure?

Bert Martinez:
Because you filed a state order. You filed a motion.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
When?

Bert Martinez:
On Friday.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Friday night. Friday at 6. Oh, wait, Friday at 6 o’. Clock. Within 10 minutes. Judge said the deportation was shut down. She got the. So.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So I wasn’t sure if he was, you know, because, like, sometimes you go to funerals. People, you know, they’re emotional, they might get the days wrong. I was like, okay, so I call Ani and I talked to her. She had no idea who the fuck I was. She’s like, kind of like, who are you? I was like, I’m your lawyer. I’ve been trying to reach you since Friday. They didn’t tell you to Lawyer? No, I didn’t know I had a lawyer. I was like, what happened? She said on this is what she said.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
She said Thursday morning, she’s trying to board the plane. She brings. She has downloads, her boarding pass on her phone. She goes through security. You know, they, you know, take her shoes off, all that. She goes to TSA before you get on the plane. She has her Honduran passport. That was her travel document.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
That was her real id. So she has her passport. They scan the passport, they take a picture of your face. You go through the security, you’re waiting near your gate. Eventually, like, everyone is, you know, section A come up. Everyone, you know, they call, they rattle it off. It’s her turn, presents her phone. And then they’re like, oh, something’s wrong with your ticket.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Go talk to customer service. She goes to talk to customer service, she gets grabbed by two big guys. Put hands behind her back. They say, you’re coming with us. She’s like, where am I going? I have a flight to catch. You’re not catching your flight. You’re not Going anywhere. You’re coming with us.

They bring her into a van, handcuffs around her back. They take her to the Burlington, Mass. Facility where they kick Jamie Rose out the pouring rain. And they hold her there and she’s like, why are you doing this to me? I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m in college. I’m going to surprise my family. At one point that one of the women ICE officers made some commentary like, oh, you’re a college student. Maybe this is a mistake.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Maybe this will work itself out. They let her call her parents right away, like, dad, I think I’m getting deported. Like, what do you mean? Our lawyer told us nothing bad ever happened in your mom and your case. What do you mean you’re getting deported? You don’t have a deportation. We don’t know about it. She does know. If she looked it up herself like I did, she wouldn’t know about it either. And she was not 9, 10 years old then.

And she’s like, sh. She told me she’s had an multiple anxiety attacks that are sleeping on a concrete floor. They make it like 50 degrees in there. I’ve had clients recently at diabetic. They said they fed her donuts. They’re throwing crackers at people like they’re pigeons. They don’t even give them soap to wash their hands. Women are like going to the toilet in front of like 25 other people.

They’re all sleeping on floors. This is what they’re doing in our country. And she experienced the same thing. And she’s a child. She’s a child under the immigration law, under the age of 21, but she’s 19 years old. My son’s a senior in high school right now, same freaking age. And she’s just so shell shocked what they did to her. And you know, you’re just talking her.

She’s brilliant. She came here, didn’t even speak a word of English. Within 10 years, she has a scholarship to a school where 12 to 15% of people get in. It’s 80 grand a year. She was getting like $78,000 a year in scholarship money. Has a huge future ahead of her. Dad’s a tailor. He hand makes suits.

He made her suits to wear for internship and for job interviews. She wanted to help him open his own tailoring shop one day, get her, you know, mba one day. He has huge dreams for herself, right? And they have her sleeping on a concrete floor. She can’t even call a lawyer. And then on Friday, they don’t even tell her I’M her lawyer. And then she said they took her in the morning with a bunch of other people to a military base, and she just sat around for hours on end not knowing what the was going on. They wouldn’t give her any notice. She said Thursday they’re trying to sign her own deportation.

And I have the paperwork, it says refuse to sign. She’s like, I’m not agreeing to deport myself.

Bert Martinez:
Oh, man. Smart enough to do that.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Oh, yeah. But. But the point is, they never even showed her the document they claimed existed from. They’re saying it’s 2015. They don’t have their facts straight. What I have learned is the following. I’ve learned that their lawyer apparently was pretty terrible because I don’t know if you can see on my wall right here, like, where am I? Right here. See this?

Bert Martinez:
Yep.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
That’s the petition for a writ of Sir Shiv in a case that went to the United States Supreme Court in 2018. Right above SB I have a picture with Chief Justice Roberts. And right behind me over here.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know, try to move it down a little bit. This. This award right here, that’s the Jack Wasserman Award for the excellence in the field of Immigration Law, the only award given in the entire country in 2019 for the attorneys that the entire immigration bar thought had the most significant legal development in the country. So we won a case called Pereira vs Sessions, and that invalidated like 5 million notices to appear. So that’s the charging document on the front end. So the charging document, the top of it has a person’s name on it, their a number. It looks like any other document you see in a courthouse. And then it’ll say the government alleges the following.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s usually like facts. Like, number one, you entered the country at a certain point in time. Number two, you know you had a green card. Number three, you committed crimes. Or number, you know you don’t have a valid visa, whatever. And then, then it lists the legal basis for why you’re in the proceedings at all. That’s called due process. But then importantly, the bottom of the form, it looks like a summons.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It says you shall appear before an immigration judge at the following time and place and location. So it’ll list, for example, Houston Immigration Court, fourth floor. Here’s the address, time and place. It’ll say 5:00am you know, like 12:00 clock on January 5, 2050. It’s just common sense just to know when and where your court hearing is. Right. No one’s to appear. How can you Appear if you don’t get notice of where the hell it is.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So this was created in 1997. The old form didn’t require that information. What was happening is people all over the country were missing their court hearings and then there’s all this litigation about, well, you mailed it to the wrong address. Please give me a new hearing. They call motions to reopen. You can get your case reopened if you don’t have proper notice of your charges and your courtroom and stuff like that. So her note, like every lawyer in the country, unless they had their head in this sand, knew about our case because we knew six months in advance we were going to the Supreme Court. We were telling everyone around Ayla was spreading this like wildfire.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Any competent immigration lawyer belongs to aila. It’s like the preeminent immigration lawyers association in the country. So she was ordered removed around 2017. Our case got accepted. Martin Luther King weekend. The Supreme Court picked our case. We filed it in the fall and out of like 150,000 people that year, they picked like 68 cases. We had the only case from the First Circuit and we had a case where six circuit courts of appeals and the Board of Immigration Appeals said the law is not being violated by missing this critical information.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And the third Circuit was the most recent to rule that that information wasn’t necessary. Our circuit, the first Circuit had never ruled on this issue. So we basically went to court one day. This is what’s hilarious. We went to court and we said, we object to this notice to appear for this guy named Wesley Pereira. He’s a Brazilian immigrant, he lives in Martha’s Vineyard. He’s like the town handyman. Everyone loves Wesley, right? He has like 100 acre farm he takes care of.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
He’s like a caretaker for this big piece of historical land in Edgar town. Rides friggin motorcycles. He goes to the track and he goes around like 150 miles an hour. He’s got like those steel, like the sparks coming off his knee pads. He’s a really hot. You know, people love Wesley and he came into our office because he had two young children, he had a booming business. He apparently had a court hearing he missed he didn’t know about. And he got locked up for a few months.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
His lawyer got him a new court hearing and then he just came into our office like, how long you been here? He’s like, I’ve been there like 12 years. I get two kids now. Like, well, what happened was he’s like, well I’ve been. I was waiting like Five, six years for my court hearing. He goes, like, when I got stopped originally, I guess he had a tail light out of his work truck. They gave him the notice to appear. So we thought it didn’t have the time and the place in the bottom of it. Later on, they mailed him a notice, and he said he told the ICE officers, he goes, I live in Martha’s Viney.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
We have a lot of problems with mail. Make sure you use my post office box. As, I guess commonplace for people live on the island.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Of course, they didn’t do that. So it was literally returned to sender. So what happened one day in Boston, the immigration court across the street from my office is they called his name, like, Wesley Pereira. Wesley Pereira. And the consequence of missing court isn’t that you get a default warrant for your arrest like you would in traffic court or any other normal court system. They literally check a box off and say goodbye to you. No soup for you. You’re deported.

They go, see you later, dude. The preventative sense here, this is what they do. You’re gone. Goodbye. We don’t care about your problem, but if you can prove you had inadequate notice, they have to reopen your case and give you your day in court. So his lawyer got it reopened because they mailed it to the wrong depository, like he had asked for. But then his lawyer is like, look, you got to pack your bags and go back to Brazil. There’s nothing I can do for you.

You can take something called voluntary departure, which for nearly everybody is a pathway to nowhere. Once you leave, you can’t come back effectively for, like, 10 years for most people, if ever. But a lot of lawyers sell this bullshit to people saying, just take V.D. they call it. V.D. is. I mean, it’s a good nickname for it because that’s basically what it is. That’s.

That’s what it does to your case. It’s horrible. It’s. And what happened to him? We just said, look, there’s this new case that came out of the Third Circuit. Our circuit’s never ruled this way, but we’ll. We’ll try to make the argument and just argue it to the First Circuit, because the bia, the Board of Immigration Appeals, is the intermediary. It’s like a. It’s like the.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
The top immigration agency where appeals go. So you have all the trials, if you will, there. The Immigration Executive Office of Immigration Review. That’s like the immigration court system. All the appeals go to the bia, and they can issue precedent decisions. So all the immigration judges in the country need to follow those. And then what’s perverse about that is the Attorney General has authority through stroke of a pen to just say, I don’t like this decision, it’s gone. I don’t like this decision.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s gone. So Jeff Sessions was doing that. William Barr was doing that. Pam Bonnie’s doing it. So now, Pam Bonnie’s doing is every favorable asylum decision they just say doesn’t exist anymore. Doesn’t exist anymore. Doesn’t exist anymore. That’s the court system non citizens face. So with Wesley, we went to court.

Bert Martinez:
Wait, wait, wait. It’s just hard for anybody to wrap their mind around it, especially if you know anything about the law where the, the judge’s opinion matters. Right. It sets the president. And also you’re saying that, that these attorney generals have the power to just delete what they don’t like. That’s exactly crazy.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
But it’s not a real court system. I mean, not to demean them, but they call themselves immigration judges. Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t refer to them as judges. He calls them hearings officers. That’s really what they are. I’m not trying to, like, you know, throw shade on them, but it’s. They’re not part of the judiciary. They can’t rule.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They can’t rule. They, for example, they can’t rule that something’s unconstitutional. They don’t have the power to do that. That’s why you see so many of our cases go into federal court, because we see problems with the way this system is run. We sue in federal court. We don’t wait around 10 years for an appeal. You just go to the federal judge, you say, look, this has been happening throughout the country. They’ve been denying people bond hearings because the BIA just recently said, We’ve got it wrong.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
For 30 years, everyone who entered the country without a visa is ineligible for bail. That violates a Supreme Court case. So some of the habeas we’ve had to file throughout the country is to just get people a bail hearing because they’re going to be denied it because all the immigration judges have to follow this precedent set by the bia. So now back to Wesley. What happened and was his relevant? Ronnie’s case is when we make the objection to the notice to appear. The government prosecutor who ultimately became an immigration judge under the Trump administration, she literally said this in court. She said our argument was frivolous at best and we didn’t stand a chance in a million years of prevailing on the merits. And she wanted that put on the record.

And then a couple of years later, we teamed up with a major law firm called Goodwin Proctor. David Zimmer is a rock star. He clerked for Justice Kagan, William J. Clerk for Scalia. So talk about the strange bedfellows we had like the Kagan clerk and the Scalia clerk, and then the lawyers that specialize in immigration all teamed up together, went to Washington D.C. and mopped the fucking floor with them in an 8 to 1 decision. And we invalidated like 5 million notices to appear. So now when you go to Ani’s case, I’ve seen her notice to appear, guess what? It violates Pereira vs Sessions.

This lawyer was asleep at the switch. All he had to do before Trump was president was literally file a motion and get their case back on track. There was a policy memo from Biden that said anyone whose case violated Pereira. And there was a companion case a few years later called Niz Chavez, because when Pereira came out, Trump ignored it. They just kept giving the same notices. And they said, look, you got the hearing notice from the court, you got what you deserve. In Pereira itself, the Supreme Court ruled that this notice has to have the time and place, otherwise it’s stripped of assessments and character. And contrary to Justice Alito wrote the dissent.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They said it’s not like a three wheeled Chevy that’s just missing a tire. You know, it’s not a car at all. Basically it’s putative. They said it was putative. So called captioned as styled as they never said it was a notice to appear. I argued an appeal in Boston where I said, this is like clamshell. I argue the equivalent of this Shabbat. What they’re trying to do is say, look, let’s just take the two documents we sent the person and morph them into one and say, look, you got the notice Congress required in 1997 because nearly every president ignored this law.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s just random. But there’s millions of these notices out there. And what happened here, you know, in the Boston, when I argued, I was like, judge. I had a judge on the bench who’s from Maine. As I was joking around, I was like, I’m from Maine too. I was like, you see this place called the Millers Floating Restaurant in Portland? I was like, imagine if you went there and ordered their, you know, clam chowder that they were known for. And then you go to eat it. It’s no potatoes and clams in it.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You complain to the friggin, you know, where the fuck Are the potatoes and clams. And then they come over and they like dump potatoes and clams and stir it with a spoon and say, look, I perfected your chowder. I’ve cured it. I was like, that’s laughable. Like from its assumption it’s never going to taste like chowder because, you know, everything has to, you know, congeal and you know, you know, you make soup, it takes a while, you know, you can’t just throw stuff.

Bert Martinez:
Yeah, it’s got a base.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
The judge will laugh. And then after we had a bowl of chatter, we were arguing in the middle of February. But that was the point is like Congress spoke and the immigration lawyers, immigration judges, the whole system just ignored a case. They’re just lazy. Like, they couldn’t literally call the court and say, what dates do you have available? How hard is this? Write down the time and the place. So for I’s case, this is what’s extremely incompetent about this attorney and I, you know, every lawyer in the country knew when our case was coming out to make this objection, to preserve the issue, to put it in an appeal. If you didn’t preserve the issue and then more importantly, go through your goddamn files and see we were pulling every file we could imagine. Every person, you just think of something like, oh man, remember that woman who had a kid with autism? We lost the case because what was happening with that notice? There was this important component, like the first notice you were served without the information.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
The government created its own regulation saying that it paused your time from accruing in the country. And what that’s important for is if people have been at 10 continuous years and they don’t have a criminal record, and if they have a parent, a spouse or a child who’s a citizen or green card holder, you can qualify for a green card only when you’re placed in a removal proceeding. So look at Ani’s mom. She’s now been here like 13 years. They have a 2 year old and a 5 year old citizen children. She qualified for a green card. If her goddamn lawyer just picked up the phone and called her and went through his files, he could have automatically got her case back on track. Ani wouldn’t have a removal order.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Her mom probably would have her green card right now and be applying for Ani to have hers too. This is inexcusable client neglect. And now you have the Trump administration. But beyond that, the family are trafficking victims. His lawyer didn’t realize this either. The mom is exploited in the labor force. So we’re filing the appropriate relief for the family right now. But let’s get to her case.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
This is the worst thing I’ve seen in 20 years. My partner’s been doing this a long time. Jeff Rubin, combined 50 years experience. You would, you would think that when a federal court issues an order, I don’t care if it’s the traffic court, when a judge tells you to do something, you do it right. You might not agree with it. You show up and you say, look, I object. I don’t think you have the authority to do this, Judge. I don’t think you’re following the case.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
If you get it wrong, you file an appeal. That’s the process. That’s due process of law. Due process applies to citizens and non citizens alike. And when you say this, I’ve been saying this for a while now. If you have due process for some, you have due process for none. It applies to everybody. Every one of you soil is entitled to due process of law rights, fourth amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, fifth amendment right to due process, first amendment right to free speech.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It goes on and on and on. People in persons is throughout the constitution. Some sections talk exclusively about citizens. Most of it does not. So she is basically sitting in Honduras right now, stripped from her college scholarship, while perversely the former president of her country was just pardoned out of a 45 year drug trafficking bid. That’s the priorities of this administration. Literally. You parted.

I talked to her on the phone a couple Saturdays ago. I’m like, did you hear what happened? I said, trump’s gonna pardon your former president. He’s doing 45 years for being a dr, a drug trafficker. And she’s like, we don’t even want him here. Are you kidding me? I’m like, yeah. And you, and you’re on a scholarship, studying business to hopefully not own a business that file a bankruptcy multiple times in your career. And this is like, it makes no sense at all from any rational point of view on law enforcement and prioritizing the deportation of people. And then, you know, Ani is sitting in Honduras now because the government’s response last week, this is what it said.

It’s a judge, she got what she wanted. She’s not an unlawful detention anymore. We’re not conceding it was unlawful, but look, she’s free in Honduras. And by the way, we didn’t think he had the authority to issue your order, so we basically ignored it.

Bert Martinez:
Right. I mean, if something happens in a case like this, what’s the next step?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
When the next step is, we’re filing an opposition, we’re filing a reply to their brief, and I’m assembling a legal army right now. I have retired federal judges reaching out to me, saying, are you kidding me? They violated a court order. I had the former district attorney who criminally prosecuted a Patriots football star. You see the people reaching out to me, aclu. I’m just mobilizing people because this isn’t just about her. Every judge in the country, because you might like if you don’t. You know, the judge says you have to pay your taxes or you’re going to lose your house. And you just say, you.

I’m not. I’m not following this judge. What happens to you? What happens if you.

Bert Martinez:
The sheriff shows up, kick you out.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Of your house, whatever, you’re gone. You know? And here, she never knew she was deported. She was a child, and a mistake was obviously made. I think they suffered from legal malpractice. But you would think that if somebody escaped persecution, is afraid for their life, they do everything they could to never go back to that environment. You wouldn’t just say, oh, well, you know, this sucks. Let’s. Let’s live out in the open, like ICE is never going to come find us.

I mean, they don’t. They know who the president is. They’ve. You know. You know what I mean? They lived through two of his administrations. So you would think you’d talk to an immigration lawyer when he’s talking about deporting everybody. And they never did because they thought there was nothing wrong with their case. And I couldn’t even find information for it.

She’s a child. She shouldn’t have been deported. This is government sanctioned child abuse. She should have been given an opportunity to go speak to a lawyer like me. They could have put her on. They could have had her do a check in. It’s called an order of supervision. They arrested her outside of the removal.

There’s all these arguments I had. If she had her day in court, I don’t think she’d be in jail anymore.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And then on top of all the things I’ve learned about her case, I just learned that their lawyer. I have no idea how this was possible. How you could miss this is like missing the Titanic hit an iceberg. I mean, this is. Pereira versus Sessions was a BFD. It was one of the biggest immigration decisions in 40 years in the Supreme Court. It just. It was like lawyers back then were like, oh, my God, he’s deporting everybody.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Supporting. And then it’s like, boom. Pereira came out. It was like, holy. This notice violates it. Well, object. File a motion to dismiss. File this.

File that. I actually argued at the BIA with Jerry Sedron from Goodwin Proctor. We actually created the remedy for the prayer violation because what was happening in Trump, they just kept violating Pereira. We’re just keep giving bad notices. So we said, how the hell can this be? Like, how can you say the. The notice is valid? And that was the thing. Like when the incomplete notice, they were saying, under the law, your time stopped accruing. So what priority said, no, your time doesn’t stop accruing at all until you’re given a proper notice.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So like Annie’s parents, her mom, the time is continuing to tick forward. So once you get to the 10 year mark, you’re eligible for cancellation of removal. If you have a parent, spouse or child who’s a citizen or green card holder that’s going to suffer exceptional, extremely unusual hardship if you were to get deported. You don’t think that would happen here. I mean, the dad has a business. He’s undocumented. This would have provided a panacea for the whole family to be whole. And the lawyer didn’t even bother reaching out to him.

And it’s not like it was that long after. I mean, Prior came out, probably six months after the removal order. And they never knew about it. They didn’t even know what the case was when I was telling the family about this.

Bert Martinez:
So.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Okay, I want to back up. This is like. This is just like another level of.

Bert Martinez:
Of abuse.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Abuse. And the whole point was she didn’t have notice. She didn’t have statutory. Her statutory rights were violated alongside her mom. That was a basis alone for a motion to reopen. So she had an infirm notice to appear. She had an ability to reopen her case under the Biden administration. She has this.

The victimization the family suffered leads to another form of relief. She’s a child under the immigration laws. She’s a frigging scholarship recipient. She’s not a bad armory, which is like a bad senorita. Now, is this like the next bumper sticker they’re going to come up with? This is just.

Bert Martinez:
This is the kind of. This is the kind of immigrant that you want coming to America.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Absolutely. I mean, I wanted to be my daughter. She’s a beautiful young woman. She is just like the salt of the earth. And then when you talk to her, they’re like, we’re praying. We hope it turns out better. I mean, let’s talk about that like the positivity here or second. Well, hold on a second.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I want to talk about this because.

Bert Martinez:
You mentioned something and I jotted it down, that some of the, I’ll just, for lack of better terms, I’ll just say some of the eyes, detention areas, you said are for profit, which that’s always troubling, right, because we have a president who’s all about the profit. You know, I mean, you mentioned the, the Honduras president that he just pardoned. He didn’t do that out of the goodness of his heart. He got something somewhere, somehow, either a deal’s coming through or something. And so, so it just seems to me that, that we have a system that is horribly broken now, right? They’re thumbing their nose at judges, at the rule of law. I think you have to be a special kind of a dickhead to be so callous and ruthless as to take children and not allow them to, you know, talk to their lawyer, talk to the parents, get some help.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You gotta be a special kind of.

Bert Martinez:
A prick for that. And I don’t know how some of these people are sleeping at night knowing what they’re doing is illegal. It’s immoral. And there’s also a huge difference between Ms. Lopez, who is again, college student, has no record of criminality versus maybe gentlemen who came here illegally, who has been caught doing drugs or trafficking drugs. It’s a, it’s a totally different scenario. But you know, the Trump administration, Trump himself promised that he’s going to go after the criminal element. And it seems the opposite.

Bert Martinez:
He’s going after the low hanging fruit. If you’re showing up for your green card appointment, I’m going to grab you. Oh, you’re showing up for your citizen interview. I’m going to grab you. So what is a law abiding immigrant supposed to do? Because it seems like no matter what, you’re going to get picked up.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Well, at a minimum, you got a lawyer up, right? You got to be like, better call Saul, get his license plate here. But you know, just, you know, not to shed light on the situation. But like, there’s a couple other cases that come to mind. You might have heard about the people working at the car wash in Boston. Austin car wash. Those are my clients. We did a press conference a couple days ago with Ayanna Presley and they got to share their testimonies about what it felt like to go through that situation. I mean, a BU college student is bragging that he got him arrested and maybe he did.

I mean, they called Him a silly. They said it was like a silly room or whatever. They said it was this, you know, hardcore investigation. You know, ICE does no wrong. No, I mean none of them are arrested on a warrant. One of them was arrested on her 45th birthday. They separated her from her daughter and shipped her daughter to Texas. The 45 year old’s diabetic.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They were feeding her donuts and crackers. Her blood sugar hit 600 by the time she wound up in Vermont, like eight days later because I had to transfer again because they don’t have the big beautiful bill. They can’t have a big beautiful bed for a woman in Massachusetts apparently. But they have plenty in these for profit prisons down south. And you know they are, they’re all crying and sharing their stories about, you know, what had happened to them. You know, it’s like their case, just like Ani Lopez is like, I co founded a non profit, it’s called mass deportation defense dot org. We’re trying to raise money like madd. It’s like get mad, get even.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
That’s the slogan. Get mad, get even, get mass deportation defense. You get even because we’re gonna start going on the offense. For people throughout the country who are experiencing these aggressive abuses of power. That’s, that’s what I’ll call it. It’s just rogue lawlessness. Like the car wash people, they were labeled criminal illegal aliens. I refer to that as maga.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Bingo. I mean, whatever. But it’s like they keep saying then when you peel back the young. And guess what happened? All seven of them. I did seven bond hearings in a row after winning seven ABS corpuses in a row. We got seven out of nine out so far. So 77% are released from custody. Zero people have a criminal record at all. These are people that are God fearing, law abiding people.

Bert Martinez:
Wait a minute, Todd, are you saying that the Trump administration is either lying or exaggerating or making things up? It’s a shocker that this is what’s happening, but.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Well, what it is is he promised to deport the worst of the worst, you know, and all the people I’ve represented, not one of them had 34 felony convictions, for example. And they’re just going after people that are out in the open, living their.

Bert Martinez:
Lives, the low hanging fruit. They’re not going down to the criminal element.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
One of the kids is 19 years old. He’s a victim of child abuse. He came here at 16, a day after his birthday. His girlfriend’s a college student. They have no parents in either of their lives, and they love each other. For five days, she had no idea where her boyfriend was. And he literally has a work permit and a Social Security number. And he’s a document from the government called deferred action, which means we’re not going to even seek to do any negative enforcement action against him.

And he said he was literally vacuuming a mat of a car. So he’s down like this vacuum a mat, and he gets grabbed. That’s an arrest under the Constitution. And I was going to ask, ICE officer can tell the difference between a documented and an undocumented ass, apparently, because he’s face ground vacuuming a map, right? He was arrested. And then they said, are you legal or illegally? Said, I’m legal. My documents are inside the shop. They have like a. Like a locker and a place where people have their backpacks.

He was immediately handcuffed, put against the wall like he was in a firing squad. They rounded all of them up. They had 22 federal agents arresting nine people that are washing and vacuuming fucking cars and doing detail. The Boston police brings their cars there, and then they’re claiming that criminal illegal aliens are running around trying to defame the person who owns this business. Character assassination against all of them.

And then, wow, seven of them in a row. Guess what happened in every hearing in the federal immigration court, the prosecutor never once said any of them had a criminal record, never once said they were dangerous, and then claim somehow some of them are flight risk when you literally knew where to find them. They live in our communities.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And these people, when I told them about the BU student, they were like, I’m going to pray for him. I hope he doesn’t know us. Why is he saying this about us? And they don’t wish him any ill will at all. These are great people. One of them that got arrested, literally, I got the kid out on his 20th birthday. Four people out of nine spent their birthdays in jail. One of them went there to work. She’s going to take the day off.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
She went on her 45th birthday to celebrate with her friends, and they. And her daughter, and they fucking arrested her and deprived her of her medication. Another one was 67 years old. His wife died of cancer recently. He’s had the same job for 26 years. He said he was treated like a dog. And people. People treat their dogs better than this.

People let their dog sleep in their beds and, you know, bring them to groomers and stuff. They’re sleeping on concrete floors. They’re treated like dirt. It’s awful. And Then it’s just, you know, just dovetail. Like Bruna Ferreira. Everyone’s talking about her.

Bert Martinez:
Yeah, let’s talk about Bruno a little bit.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Let’s talk about Bruno. She was in my office an hour ago. What a hot she is. She’s got a lot to say, you know, but I want to leave her alone right now. She needs to be with her child. She loves Michael, her son. All she talked about in jail was her son. And all the women surrounded her in this for profit hellhole in Louisiana.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
She said when one woman’s trying to kill herself every day, I guess somebody, they give a razor to try to like slice her face. They just, they don’t even know why they’re there. They have no access to counsel. The outside world. A woman gave a miscarriage. There’s all these pregnant women down there. She said they treat them like cattle. Her grandfather was a cattle herder.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
He said the whole key is you like, you move cattle all around to confuse them. She said, they’ll grab you at 2 in the morning. They send you to another prison. They don’t tell you where you’re going. It’s cold, it’s hot. You hear water dripping. They leave the lights on. I hear this time and time and time again from all the people that get released from jail.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
What happens to her is a tragedy. She, when she was a young lady, she married a high school sweetheart. He was a fucking lowlife. He harmed her. That’s why she couldn’t get her green card right away. She was 18 and a half years old. She came here at six. They label her a criminal, illegal alien.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Let’s talk about illegal. For example, she came here lawfully with a visa. Her grandmother brought her here to meet her baby sister who was just born. And then her grandmother flew back and didn’t ever violate her visa. And when she was going to fly back to pick up Bruna, she died unexpectedly. So how, how is the six year old gonna get back home? Just like how is Ani Lopez gonna get back home? I mean, they’re children. Like a six year old is supposed to like get an Uber and go over to Logan Airport and with a pass. That’s, that’s like, that’s like so stupid to say something like that.

Like, like again, peel back the youngin. That’s, that’s stupidity to say something like that, right? And then they claim she has this crime. And I said, show us the proof. I said that on cnn. Show us the proof she has a crime. Because I know she does not have a Crime. Right. And we’ll get to that in a second.

So she’s trying to get a green card, and then she meets Michael Levitt, falls in love with him. Madly in love. They’re young. They’re like 21, you know, 20 years old, you know, you know, young and having fun. And they get. They realize they’re going to have a baby together. They’re going to get married. He wins a million dollars playing DraftKings.

They love each other. And like millions of other people, their relationship descended. It happens, right? And all they’ve each done for each over the years is had joint custody, loved Michael Jr. Did everything they could for the kid. He doesn’t go at night without food and, you know, shelter. He gets taken care of. Yeah. But they’ve.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They’ve maintained a relationship because at the end of the day, her son’s a Levitt. She’s always part of the Levitt family. She picked Caroline Levitt to be the godmother over her own sister. She has one sister, and she had Caroline, and she chose Caroline to be the godmother. That’s a big deal in Catholicism. She’s deeply Catholic. She doesn’t believe in abortion. For example, you know, she was pregnant.

She wasn’t married yet. She’s like, I’m having the baby. We’re going to get married. She has those traditional values, and you have to respect that. And that’s who she is. She has two businesses. She owns a commercial cleaning business. She owns a bikini shop called Pretty Little.

Pretty Little Rich Girl. The name of it. You know, good name for a business. She pays taxes. And the day she gets arrested, she’s going to pick her son up after school like she always does. He lives about 35 miles away from her. She lives on the North Shore in a town called Revere, about 35 miles away. Southern New Hampshire is like a suburb of Boston these days.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So Michael lived with her until he’s about, you know, kindergarten. And then as a family decision, they said, let him go to the schools in New Hampshire. They were better than the ones where she was living. And. Yeah, it makes sense. Sure. She said she wants him to be around his dad. He’s 11.

He’s going through puberty. That makes sense, too. She’s never had an issue with elevens, but, you know, obviously the only issue is they didn’t get married. And that happens, though. I mean. I mean, I had Thanksgiving. Like, I have an uncle and aunt. I love both of them.

They got divorced a few years ago. They’re still part of your life. It’s just. It’s an altered relationship, right? This is just. This happens everywhere in America, you know, you. Why didn’t you marry your girlfriend? I like her more than your wife. I mean, this is a lot of these situations, and families feel like you’re. You really blew it with this one.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know, I like the. I like that other girl, boy, a lot better, but, you know, whatever. Everyone’s family’s a little messed up, right? Thanksgiving, you know, you just be thankful. And a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, getting in a car that’s not even registered to her. She lives in a location very few people know about. She gets surrounded by five unmarked vehicles of federal agents. They just surround her and box her in. It looks like a.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Like a drug bus. If you’re, like, doing criminal defense for long, it looks like these are kind of things you see, where it’s like they have a controlled by. And they were in wires, and everybody. They just swap in. And everyone’s like, holy, you caught us. I just sold drugs. It looks like that. And it’s the same type of thing, but they surround her.

And then at first, they ask her for her license. And she’s like, yeah, I have my license. It’s in my. It’s in my pocketbook. It’s on the floor here. They’re like, well, she’s going to get. I say, no, no, you can’t get your license. And then somebody says, are you bruna? And she’s kind of like, what do you mean? I’m like, bruno, why? You know, thought this was a traffic stop.

Like, she’s thinking, but the traffic cops don’t put masks on their faces. You know, they remind me of the mask over the face. It kind of reminds me of this T shirt. When I was a public defender, I went through training, and this rockstar, Laura came in one day, a T shirt on, and said, don’t tell my mom I’m a criminal defense lawyer. She thinks I played piano in a whorehouse. And that’s kind of what it reminds me of. These masks they put over their faces these days. It’s like, you know, dude, own it.

You know? Right? I’m not Batman. I’m not gonna run around a cape when I go to a courthouse. Show your face.

Bert Martinez:
So. So let’s back up. So they. They stop her. She thinks it’s some kind of weird traffic stop. But now they know her name.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
That’s exactly her name. So they kind of blew their cover. And she’s kind of like. And then they’re like, get out of the vehicle. She’s like, do you have a warrant? And they don’t show her anything. So they detain her. They drive off for their vehicle. They bring her to.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I think the. She claims she went to the Revere police station. I don’t really understand why that would be. That’s not an immigration processing facility. This is all moving fast. So she goes from her home to a local police station. Then she winds up in New Hampshire, and then a few hours later, she winds up in Vermont, like well over 150 miles away. She can’t even find her lawyer.

She had an immigration lawyer working on the case. It wasn’t me at the time. And that lawyer didn’t you know, no habeas was filed federal court. And then lo and behold, guess where she winds up. The for profit prison down south. She’s merely awaiting her turn for a green card like tens of thousands of other people. There was no basis under the law to just abruptly detain her.

You can. If she’s out committing crimes, if she’s joining a terrorist group, like, obviously they can enforce the laws. I mean, they’re modern, new. But she got her green card when. She didn’t get her green card yet, but she got DACA when she was like 20 years old. Whenever it came out, she applied for it right away. She got it. To get DACA, you have to be admissible.

DACA is very similar to getting a green card. They do a background check on you. And they kept saying she’s a criminal, illegal alien. So the, the. I mean, what is illegal mean? I mean, she’s trying to legalize her status since she was 18 years old. She’s always been trying to get it. She’s just had the relationship she had that would have led to the quicker green card. Just one ended because it was horrible, and then the other one just ended because they weren’t meant for each other.

It was 11, so. And then she had. She had DACA. And now she’s in a process now where she qualifies for her residency. And she had a hearing coming up on Cinco de Mayo. And then she just gets sandbagged and arrested. They then give her the warrant. I mean, this is what’s hilarious.

They give her a warrant now in Vermont to try to justify the arrest in Boston. It’s like, hello, it’s a different state.

Bert Martinez:
Are they trying to do a.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
We don’t time travel here. And it’s not even a retroactive warrant. Well, the thing is, is the Warrants that they create, they’re administrative warrants. No judge ever reviews them. So this is like another legal fiction. They create their own document called the warrant, saying we want to arrest the person. And here’s why. We think this person’s violated an immigration law.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They’re only enforceable, really, in public places. No judge signs off on it. But when they detained her, they didn’t have any warrant at all. So they just, after the fact, they created a document, I think, trying to justify her illegal detention. Right. And on top of that, then they sent her down to Louisiana. So what happened was she had a motion pending to get her a bail hearing quickly, but because they transferred her, it derailed her case several weeks. So we had the bond hearing two days ago.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And this is what, what really gets me is a few stories came out in the press recently. There’s some local reporter that, I guess he broke the scoop, Simon Rios, I guess he was talking about it like Tuesday night, you know, I had a really great Thanksgiving because of that, because I got hired on Monday. And this, you know, this was never in the public. They never wanted their dirty laundry, if you have it at all. They just, they just kind of like, just give me a bail hearing. I want to get out of here. I shouldn’t be detained. At first, everyone, it seemed like it was just like half ass that they accidentally arrested somebody who was almost Caroline’s sister in law.

I mean, I could see them arresting Melania Trump. I mean, they just, because, because what I’ve seen, they just arrest people like, like the people at the car wash, they throw them in the van and then they’re like, it’s a numbers game. Like, maybe one person has a removal order. Three people are citizens. It’s just like, oh, well, sorry, don’t fuck with ice. That’s their attitude these days. And mine’s like, don’t fuck with us. So this is what they do.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So they, they detain her. They pretend it’s a traffic stop, then they blow their cover. Then they make a warrant after the fact, then they ship her to the Louisiana hellhole that she was in. And now we get our bond hearing, right? So after they’re calling her the criminal illegal alien multiple times. The Homeland Security secret, you know, press, you know, they, they keep saying this. Criminal, illegal alien. Criminal, illegal alien. Criminal, legal alien.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s like, it’s almost like it’s a code word for like the zombie apocalypse, like the grim. So I keep hearing this and I’m just, it’s like after a while you know, it’s like, okay, please. I’m a criminal chancellor for 20 years, in addition to immigration lawyer. You have to play that game with me. So we look at the document they’re talking about, we go to the immigration court, and we realize that the crime they’re claiming she committed was when she was 16 years old, her and another girl were, like, tussling with each other in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot. And a cop drives in. He gets out of his car, and he’s like, hey, you know, slow down here. What’s going on? They’re like, oh, it’s my change.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s her. They’re, like, arguing over, like, eight bucks. Like, who gets the change back? Stupid, right? And he goes, look, go talk to the juvenile judge. He hands them. He gives them a summons. They have to go to court with their parents. And then the judge, basically, it’s a private proceeding. It’s not a crime.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s not a criminal proceeding. So there was never an arrest. This was never a crime. And what’s important is under Massachusetts law, just like. And I think in every other state, this is a private proceeding. You’re not supposed to stigmatize children by labeling them criminals. So she goes to this court process, and that case gets tossed. The judge is just.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s kind of just like the scary shit. Judge is like, you know, I could ruin your life. Don’t it up. I’m dismissing your case. I’m a judge. I have a robot. You know, you’re an impressionable child. You know, they do this stuff.

It’s kind of like. And it works most of the time because she never. So it’s the only. So the only time she ever got arrested was the unconstitutional bag job on November 12. She was never arrested before she was summoned to a juvenile proceeding. Somehow this was leaked to the press. But DHS has been talking about it before. The press was talking about it because I knew from day one she never had a criminal charge on her record.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I have her fingerprints. ISIS had her fingerprints. DHS has had her fingerprints for years. It doesn’t show up on there. How they know about this is beyond me because as a lawyer, if I go to that same courthouse, I can’t even access this document. Only Bruno could go there and get a copy of her juvenile file. It’s that protected under the law. And yet DHS is press secretary has been calling her a criminal legal alien.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So then we do the hearing. This is. This will make you laugh. So I have Jason Thomas in my office. He Left Homeland Security. He was a prosecutor there for seven years, and he was a criminal prosecutor for seven or eight before. Fifteen years of experience, the managing attorney in my office. So I said, I’m going to, I’m going to send one of their own against them.

So I was in the hearing with him and Jason just went chapter and verse. Here is why she’s not a danger, indeed. She has no criminal record. Here is why she’s not a flight risk, indeed. She was arrested in the parking lot of her house. She has two businesses. She pays her taxes. She’s been living here since she was 6.

She came here on a lawful visa. And then we talked about all the ways in which she qualifies for a green card now because she’s in these removal proceedings. And what was bizarre too is she was near the end of her case. And then they recalender her case one day after she filed her document to get her green card, which looks suspicious. It’s like rather than just let USC process her green card, they like restarted her immigration case again. And then lo and behold, she gets arrested a few months later. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Bert Martinez:
No.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
But whether they ever admit that’s what happened is for another day. So we argue all this stuff. And then we actually talked about the rumor that she was a criminal. She had a criminal record. And we said, look, this appears to be this juvenile case, and guess what? This is when she was 16. This is before she ever got DACA. And she actually had disclosed this before to the immigration authorities. So they knew about it.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s not a crime, it’s juvenile. And this is part of her immigration file, which is not public record either. So to label her a criminal legal alien is false factually and legally to say she’s a danger. So we said all this stuff about her. Then the government had its turn to basically continue to say she’s a criminal. Illegal alien, criminal. The government said, I stipulate. That’s it.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Stipulate is a big word in the legal world. It means I agree basically with everything Jason and Todd just said about Bruno Ferreira. So then they issue a press release. Now the press release is great. So now the press release says a Biden appointed judge let her out on $1500. They didn’t put in there that 1500 is the minimum amount you can ever get in the immigration court. We asked for the minimum and she got the minimum. And then they said, I stipulate.

And then when she said, judge said, you want to do an Appeal. The government said, no, I waive appeal. I stipulate. I waive appeal. I stipulate a wave appeal. That’s a whole lot. So then, yeah, so then the press secretary says she’s a criminal legal alien. Says, again, she’s been arrested for a crime.

Libel and slander. It’s in writing and it’s spoken word, Bible and slander. Look it up. Reckless disregard for the truth. The truth is she was never arrested for a crime, and simple as that. She was never arrested. The only arrest she ever had was the unconstitutional arrest on November 12th. Going to pick up her son, who she loves dearly.

That’s what happened to her. And she’s never wanted the spotlight. Her case is viral. And then to label her a criminal legal alien, then they said, guess what? You can go download an app and we’ll give you a thousand dollars and a free trip back home. More propaganda that. That ad misstates the law. Any immigration lawyer will tell you that there’s hardly any incentive. Like they say, if you leave on your own on our.

If you download the app and leave, you may come back, but if we deport you, you’re never coming back. That’s false. It’s just false as a matter of law. Again, it’s misstating the law. And it’s just part of this narrative that they only go after the worst of the worst. Everyone’s a criminal illegal alien or an illegal alien. Sometimes you’re a violent criminal illegal alien.

Sure, that’s often true. I mean, you’ll call it like it is, but show the proof as I. Show me the proof. She has a crime. They never have. And guess what? It was never a crime to begin with. It’s.

Bert Martinez:
Well, and I think that.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I think that nothing to rob you, bro. But then they put a fucking ankle monitor on her. She’s a sex offender in violation of the bond order by the judge. So they have a walking around with an ankle monitor right now. So we’re taking them to federal court over that now. And guess what? It’s on my home turf.

Bert Martinez:
Yeah, it’s incredible to me. So, Okay, I want to back up because some of this, especially with Ani Lopez there, you know, we have the Obrega Garcia story where he was deported to that terrible place in El Salvador. They brought him back after months and months of federal court orders and disobedience. Then they brought him back immediately, rearrest him under some fake charges, it seemed like. I mean, they just. What you’ve been talking about. What they. They rearranged him, said, oh, he’s a drug trafficker, a human trafficker, he’s a criminal element.

Bert Martinez:
Of course they never prove any of this. And they eventually got their way. I guess they finally deported them to wherever it is. But do you, one of my concerns is I can see this repeating itself. I mean like Ms. Lopez, do you, do you, do you fear that this may happen to her?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I don’t. Because what’s different about her situation is she’s so young and like she’s 19 year old, she’s a child, she has no criminal record. I think he had some criminal charges. He already had his day. Like he had his court hearing. He got something called with, I believe it was withholding of removal. That basically means you have a removal order, but it’s withheld. It’s like a.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
They choose not to take action on it so they can reactivate it in the future. And then with his case, another thing was different is I think when the order not to, to transfer him issued, they were arguing that bizarre law from like 1798, like the aliens Enemies Act.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know, it’s like the greatest hits. Like they resurrect every statute you can think of. So I think is that one of the issues in that case, I believe is that the plane may have left US soil. Whereas here, last I checked is Texas is in the United States of America. And the order that issued in Boston that said don’t deport her from one of the 50 states was still valid on Saturday when they illegally deported her. So that’s what’s different about the case. Now he was still in custody because he was in this prison sea cot. And I think the claim was El Salvador was actually holding him in their own prison.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
But it turned out that prison was getting money from the United States to hold people we’ve chosen to deport there. Right. So what they’re arguing for Ani, is that she’s not in custody anymore. Well, but they also violated a court order. So I’m going to be asking the judge to return her back because at a minimum, I think she’s a witness to what they did to her. They didn’t let her know she had a lawyer. She’s having anxiety attacks, she has no access to counsel for two days. They then delete her from a database.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I mean, they think I’m a fucking idiot. I’m a nationally known expert on this. You think if I knew she was in Texas, I’d filed a lawsuit in Wyoming or remain. I mean. No, you file it where the person is held and they help. Withheld from our office, where she was in the last publicly recognizable document said she was at ERO Boston. So she was in Boston. If she was somewhere else, they should have told us where she was, because she was still in ICE custody.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And I think that’s what they’re doing, is they’re, like, passing bodies, possibly to the military. Why the military is engaged in civil immigration enforcement is a conversation for another day. But they are using military jets all over the country to basically, just like the herding of cattle that Bruno was telling me her grandfather did. It’s just demonizing the port. Demonize and deport. That’s the narrative. Demonize, deport. Label them criminal.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Illegal aliens. Label them illegal aliens. Say that this is a crime when it isn’t. Like, overstaying a visa is not a crime. Maybe it should be. Change the law. Seeking asylum is not a crime, but you can change the way people seek asylum. Again, change the law.

Bert Martinez:
So I want to back up. So overstaying a visa. Overstaying a visa is not a criminal offense. Civil offense.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s a violation of the civil immigration law. So let’s say Bruno. So Bruno overstayed a visa. So they’re saying she overstayed it when she was 6. But under the law, she’s a child, so she’s not punished. There’s no consequence until six months after you turn 18. When she was at that deadline, actually, the government gave her a notice to appear before an immigration judge, and she did. And when she went there, she said, look, I have a. I married my high school boyfriend. I’m trying to get a green card to him. So the judge paused. Her case turned out he was a loser. And then DACA came out. So she got DACA. So the case just basically lay dormant for years.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And then it was. It was kind of like she was trying. You know, then she found Michael Levin. And the goal was, obviously, when you get engaged, that means you’re going to marry somebody eventually, right? That was the love of her life, she thought. And then it turned out not to be. But again, she has nothing negative to say about the Levitts. It’s just. That’s how life happens.

She likes this new wife. His new wife’s fine. She. She’s a good role model of Michael Jr. And, you know, they’re. That’s just how it is. Like, they’re not together anymore. I mean, it happens a lot.

Not everyone married their first love or their first boyfriend or girlfriend. I mean, that’s That’s. I don’t think that’s unusual in the world.

Bert Martinez:
So it’s not unusual, and it’s not a crime, and it’s not any kind of moral question about somebody. It’s just like you said, life. Let me ask you this.

The Supreme Court of the United States, which is, in my opinion, gone completely haywire, but they. They had a ruling, and you correct me if I’m wrong, that ICE can profile. So if you’re brown, if. If your English is not so bueno, if you have specific jobs, then they can profile you and stop you, detain you, possibly arrest you.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, maybe they’ll profile me. Let me show you this. All right. You see that? Yeah, that’s my bad ombre. I got this coffee mug a few years ago when he was president. I was like, well, you’re gonna afford all the bad ombres. You’re gonna go through this one first, right?

Bert Martinez:
Yeah, absolutely.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
But, I mean, that can’t. But that case, that’s not actually. That’s not the law. So that was like a temporary decision by the court. They call it the shadow docket. Right. What you’re seeing that Trump does this all the time. Magnificently.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So what they do is you go to federal court and you seek injunctive relief. So a judge is like, preliminarily, I’m issuing an injunction. Here’s why, you know, Constitution is being violated. Rules, regulations, ICE offices, to the core, they’re administrative agents, so they’re governed by the Administrative Procedures Act. They don’t have nearly the arrest power that they claim to have. So that’s why you always go to federal court, because they have to follow rules and regulations. Congress basically created, has basically given a limited amount of power to this agency to enforce immigration laws. And what you see is they often go far astray of what they’re allowed to do.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
That’s why you have to sue in federal court. And judges can issue injunctive relief, temporary restraining orders. And what’s happening now is when they have a certain magnitude to them. For example, ICE can’t just roam the streets of Chicago and do whatever the hell it wants. A judge will issue these orders, but then what they do is they leapfrog to the Supreme Court on this thing called the shadow docket. So you’re not. There’s no full argument. There’s no full briefing.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s just more like a quick summary process. And what the Supreme Court has been doing, which is controversial, is they’re effectively allowing all these rulings to take place, to stop the judges at the trial courts that are trying to effectively maintain the status quo. So the litigation develops through trials and full appeals, because these cases can take years to develop before they ever get to the Supreme Court. So they’re effectively leapfrogging the process, going to the Supreme Court.

And then it only takes five of them to say, look, we disagree with a trial judge at this juncture. They’re not saying necessarily that that case can’t be proved, that this is discriminatory intent. And what Justice Kavanaugh’s decision, I think what he was talking about, I don’t agree with it, but he was, like, analogizing the reasonable suspicion. So when an immigration arrest, if you will, or a detention is similar under the Fourth Amendment, you have search and seizure.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So when you seize a person, this temporary seizure is called Terry stops. Those have to be based on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a crime or you might be about. You might be in the process of committing one. That’s based kind of on, like, the investigative tools that a police officer will have, whereas probable cause is to arrest somebody. So it’s kind of like, you know, you don’t necessarily probable cause, but maybe you can say, hey, come here. I want to talk to you. You ask some questions. Your investigation.

Then you let somebody go, you arrest them. What they’re basically doing these days is they go up to somebody and they’re like, show me your papers. And I’m like, show. I’ll show you the Fifth Amendment. Shut the fuck up. You don’t ever have to answer the question, like, how do they know if I’m a citizen or. I was born in Canada, right. My grandparents are born again.

I look the same. My mom is from England. You know, my grandfather fought Nazis at 17 years old, took a bullet for this country. He’s a Purple heart veteran, married a proud English woman. My grandmother, you know, she died when I was, like, three, and my mom was born there and came over. I spread her ashes in the Thames last summer, and I went to the flat in Hammersmith where she was born in 1945. And now, 80 years later, his grandson is fighting the same mentality that he fought a war over overseas back in 19, you know, the mid-1940s.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know, it’s just there’s so much going on these days for, you know, just civil rights lawyers in general. And that’s basically what I do. I’m fighting for civil rights. I don’t care. I’ll fight for your freedom of speech. I’ll Fight for your right to have a gun. I mean, you know, we’re more of a libertarian to the court and what you see, it shouldn’t matter where you’re born, you’re entitled to due process of law. It shouldn’t matter who you voted for, you’re entitled to due process of law.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I mean, I have a, I mean, I have a sharp tongue. Not everyone agrees with me, but I’ll have a beer with you. I don’t care who you voted for. And it was, you know, I have a lot of Trump supporters. I play hockey with a lot of these guys and they come up to me and like, I saw you in the news. Tell me about it. Like, like Jamie Rosa, I had a guy in tears, he goes, I didn’t vote for that. I hope you take them for millions.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
He goes, that is so wrong. That is just so wrong to do. And they tell them, oh, they changed a 19 year old college student up and had her sleeping on a floor. And they’re like, my daughter’s the same age. They did what? What did she do wrong? She wanted a better life. That’s what she did wrong. And thank God, Dick Durbin, a week ago, he endured, he reintroduced the Dream act on the house. You know, Ani was his 150th dreamer and he said, look, I’m reintroducing the Dream Act.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And he put her picture up and talked about her. He was in tears. You know, he got angry at one point, as he should have. And Murkowski is co sponsoring that bill with him. She’s a Republican. And you know, I talked to her, like, I got a few of these cases recently, they just go viral. Like the people in the car wash, they had no idea, like a BU student was talking about them. They just had no idea because these are people that they stay in their lane and Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
What’s bizarre, what I do is like so many of the people that came here lawfully, the green card holders are the ones with the worst criminal records, whereas the people that are undocumented almost always, like they, they just keep their head down, they work hard, they want to be respected, they think they’re going to get their chance. I’ve had clients like that. Their kids are in the military, they’re becoming police officers, and then they just get thrown in a van and whisked away in the middle of the night. When you deport a person, like you take a person, right? So who’s paying the mortgage now? The landlord’s not getting paid, the credit cards aren’t getting paid. The truck payment isn’t getting paid. The employees aren’t getting paid. I mean, I climb my house. A few weeks ago, he walked across the border.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Twenty years ago, he barely speaks English. He’s bringing in, like, $3 million a year doing Sheetrock. He has all these employees and all these. He’s like. I was like, you never talked to a lawyer before, but you have a good case. He just had no idea. He’s just that busy working his ass off. And he’s just like, do I have a chance to stay here or not? Like, you might, but you needed a lawyer.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I mean, it could have helped you a long time ago, but let’s start now. And there’s so many people like this, they’re just ignorant of their rights. And they all. At the car wash, people, they’re crying, like, why are you calling us criminals? Like, like, literally, people said, I left my wallet in my car by accident. It was still there at the end of the day, when they did a detail for my car, they didn’t even take any of the change. Good people. So many of them are religious, and so many of them, honestly, they’re very conservative in the nature. A lot of clients that represent, they probably would vote Republican if they were given the chance.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And yet when immigration comes up, one party is just demonizing them all the time.

Bert Martinez:
Well, what I find, what I find so interesting in my experience is that for the most part, the Latinos, the Mexican people, people from El Salvador, they come here, as you said, and they put their head down and they get to work. And most of the time, I want to say 80% of the time, they’re sending that money that they make here out of the United States to Mexico or El Salvador to make their family lives better there. They’re just here to work.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Right?

Bert Martinez:
And so the thing that boggles my mind is, again, you have this administration that’s saying the reason that the housing is so expensive is because all these illegals have taken houses that should have gone to US Citizens, which, again, is false. And then also the other thing that I find interesting is that they talk about how you’ve lost jobs because of these illegal people. And again, when I remember the first time Trump was in office, the farmers in California couldn’t get anybody at any price to pick their crops. And they had, like, four or five tons of food that went to waste because Trump had chased away the crop, the agricultural people.

And then last but not least, again, I’m not trying to disparage all Chinese people But when you look at the people who have taken jobs away from Americans, they are, a lot of them are Chinese, not all of them, but the thing that sticks out to me is you have a lot of Chinese nationals. Some of them are citizens, all of them are here legally. And they do a lot of espionage. At least three or four times a year, a Chinese person will be caught doing espionage.

Bert Martinez:
They just, they just caught that one lady, I think was it this year. She worked for the mayor’s office in New York. And so other than maybe getting a little rowdy, if you’ve ever been in a Mexican or a Spanish neighborhood, they like to party, they like to do the fireworks, but they’re good people. And, and none of them have tried to take our planes down, try to take our buildings, try to, they don’t do espionage. But yet, for whatever reason, Trump, who at one point employed a lot of these undocumented people working at his, at his facilities, now these guys are the scapegoat. It makes no sense. But what I find interesting to me, and I’d love to get your take on it, it seems like Trump has put the approval on hateful, meaningful spirit. Right? There’s a lot of people out there that are, that feel that, that somehow they’ve been wronged.

Bert Martinez:
And it’s the Spanish or the Mexicans or the, the undo or the documented worker even, or I’m sorry, immigrants. It’s their fault. Nothing.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
The truth, I mean, it’s bizarre. I remember like a couple months ago, I had some in my office and he was a citizen, I think it was from, he was from Brazil. And this was, this is like horrible. Like, he was, my client was, you know, they’re all part of the church. So he, my client would have been his brother in law. And they had a wedding planned and everything. They met in church, you know, hard worker. And then they arrested this guy and shipped him to Louisiana when he had a wedding planned.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And then they said he was a flight risk and denied him bond. The flight risk he was going to get married. I mean, a lot of people run away from the, you know, run away from the chapel. He was literally trying to get married. And then when I was talking to him, you know, he’s like, I was like, kind of like, well, this is kind of how it is right now with this administration. He’s like, oh, I voted for Trump. I’m like, we just voted to divorce, deport your brother in law, right? I mean, and he was like, he’s like, he didn’t understand. He Goes, no, he’s gonna go after the criminals. I was like, no, he literally just went after somebody who’s trying to marry a sister.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And then the immigration judge that he put on that bench said he was a flight risk. Flight from where he was trying to be, you know, try to get married, want to have kids, had a job, and again. And then I was his fiance. Can’t even pay the rent because it was a two income household, and now it’s one. And he’s been deported because they denied him bail, saying he was a flight risk. And to fight that, you needed to spend thousands of dollars either going to federal court or waiting six months to a year for an appeal. I mean, they just drag their feet. Like, another thing they do a lot is when you. When they arrest you, they have no problem. They’ll arrest you. I had a guy arrested on the 4th of July and somebody arrested on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, people getting arrested on their birthdays. And then when it’s time to post the bail, after you sue them in court, they then drag their feet like, oh, come back tomorrow. We don’t have time to process it, or our computer system isn’t working today. This is the game they play all the time. Then you have to sue them again in federal court saying, I want my client immediately released from custody. Enough’s enough.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I mean, they act like liberty is not a big deal. I mean, there was this Judge Wolf. He retired recently. You might have heard of him. Yeah, I had a case with him, and he was just basically like, one day of unlawful detention is one day too money. Like, it’s a big deal to be sitting in a jail. And we act like people’s time isn’t done. You can’t. That’s the one thing. You can never get more of it again. I don’t care if you’re a billionaire or poor, you can never get another minute at a time. It never comes back to you. And they just. You just. You’re just taking people. Even if you want to deport them, you don’t have to detain them.

Like, you detain them when they refuse to cooperate with you. When they run away, we tell them to check in at ice. They don’t show up, we’ll go arrest those people. But if people like Annie Lopez, if you just said, go check in an ICE office. Go, go have your Thanksgiving, you need to talk to a lawyer. There’s something wrong with your case, contrary to what you’re telling me. And this is a girl who’s shell shocked. Imagine that.

You’re gonna go visit your family. I mean, I trouble doing that. I remember when I was in college one time I was like out in Arizona. I grew up in maine. It’s like 3,000 miles away. It was a disaster trying to go home. And then you go there and it’s like two days later you’re gonna leave, you’re all jet lagged. I’m like, this sucks.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I’m never doing this again. I’m just not doing it again. And she was doing that to go surprise her family. Surprise, I’m in Honduras. They didn’t let her call her family when she was on the plane. She wasn’t even for sure she was getting deported. She thought they’re bringing her to Texas, possibly to bring her home. And then they put her on a plane the next morning to Honduras.

And she got off the tarmac and she had to find her grandparents she hadn’t seen in 12 years. They didn’t give her the courtesy of a phone call.

Bert Martinez:
You know, the thing that I’ve always admire about good lawyers is that they can dispute with you, they can agree to disagree, right? But they can point out, hey, your case is different because of XYZ and here’s this and blah, blah, blah. But when lawyers refuse to follow the law, when they refuse to obey a judge’s order and you have all of these other people kind of doing the same thing, they may not be lawyers, but they’re ICE officers and they know better. That to me tells me that their case is super weak. That when you’re going out of your way to lie, cheat, disobey, your case is not only weak, but you know, it’s weak. And unfortunately we have an administration that’s like, hey, it’s okay. I mean, was it this attorney that was, it’s a Trump appointed attorney. Bovine Bovet Bove, third Circuit.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, yeah, I remember it was something like, you know, the court. Yeah. He said he’s a third circuit judge who can write presidential decisions that is one step below the U.S. supreme Court.

Bert Martinez:
And, and here’s a guy who’s obviously not suited to be a judge. He’s, he’s made some, many racial comments. He’s already said, you know, again, we’ve already said it. The judges or the law is ongoing investigation. But even, even if they, even if they conclude that the law was broken, I think they’re investigating whether they can do a criminal contempt of court. What does that mean? Because it’s not like they’re going to Arrest anybody. There’s almost no point in coming out and saying, hey, Bove. And all these people broke the law.

Bert Martinez:
They’re in criminal contempt. But we have no teeth and cannot do anything about it. That’s really what’s going to happen, right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
At the end of the day. What the Constitution is our design. It’s what we’ve agreed to live by. Right. And it assumes good faith. So there’s three co, equal branches of government. You have the judiciary, Congress and the, you know, the president, the executive branch. So if the executive, and I think this is really the failure we’re seeing these days is like there’s too much of a concentration of power in one party, right? And years ago, like McCain wouldn’t have gone for this. Romney, the, you know, Republicans, I mean, I’m not against Republicans. I know a lot of them, hey, they used that, they used to have ideas.

Bert Martinez:
Well, and, and also the Republicans, you know, I consider myself more Republican than anything. I kind of, I left the Republican Party when they got in bed with the insurance companies, whatever. That was 30, 40 years ago, under the torch stuff. But bottom line is I still lean mainly Republican. Uh, but I don’t recognize this, this is the extreme right. Uh, and, and this is not a Republican Party that I grew up with. They’re, they’re not cons, they’re not real conservatives. They’re, they are, let’s win at any cost.

Bert Martinez:
It doesn’t matter. I suspect that the next three years we’ll see some people disappear, get assassinated, whatever. I, I don’t think, I don’t know. We’re not seeing the worst of it. We’re just seeing the beginning.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, it’s possible, but, yeah, it just reminds you like the old adage might beats, right? I mean that’s, that’s really what you’re seeing here, right? You know, to, to deport the amount of people he claimed he would deport. I mean, it’s like on par. Was saying he’s going to reduce costs by 1500%. Nobody ever asks him a question like, you can’t go less than 100%. Like, where does this stuff come from? But, you know, again, it’s like, you know, it reminds me like, like for years I used to think a lot of the politicians, it was almost like wrestling, right? They sparring out and open, but then they get on the same plane after and they fly to the next event. It was, it was really like that for years. And it was always like this, give and take. Like, you know, the Democrats control But you’re from your, you gotta do something for your constituency.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So it was always like, we get a little more, but you still get something. And now it’s basically like you’re getting nothing at all unless you stay in, you know, this, you know, you follow this like MAGA principles and if you, if you, if you, you run astray from that at all, we’re gonna basically end your career. And it’s just, it’s just like such a dysfunctional way of going. And like, like even the court, I mean, people say she’s a left leaning. It’s really not even like that. Like the six judges on the Supreme Court that are conservative in their nature, they don’t even have the same philosophy. Like, like Gorsuch is actually outstanding in a lot of immigration cases. He’s, he’s got like this libertarian streak to him that I really appreciate.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Like, he’s really good in some criminal justice cases, whereas like other judges aren’t, are more like, aren’t like that at all. It’s like, you know, it’s just, you got to understand the legal doctrine a little bit more. But they’re not, they’re not all like cookie cutter versions of one another. But yeah, right, there is, there is a big difference. When you have six people that kind of sway one way more than three, you know, ideally you want four or five. You know, ideally you just want free minded people that rule to uphold the rule of law. I just can’t imagine any judge, I don’t care if it’s traffic court, probate, family court, court, anywhere you are in the country, if a judge tells you to do something as a lawyer, you never ignore it. If you don’t agree with it, you’re supposed to show up and say, look, Judge, I object.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I want a hearing on why your decision is wrong. If you don’t agree, you file an appeal. And for her, like they take a child going home for Thanksgiving and they literally put her on a plane. And then rather than saying sorry or I didn’t, I thought they might say they didn’t know. I mean, it’s possible because it was a Friday night, they didn’t get the decision in time. Whatever. I mean, it’s still. Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse.

But there’s, but, but there’s also, it’s similar. Like you could accidentally kill a person or you can murder them. This, you know, there’s a difference in the mentality behind your decision. Like here they’re saying, we knew you told us not to do Something, yet we did it anyway because we thought we knew more about the law than the judge who told us not to do something.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
No, I mean there needs to be a concept. I’m going to be asking for a consequence, but I’m not the judge. I’m asking the judge to require her to be brought back to the United States. That may fail, but they need to be held accountable for ignoring a court order. I mean, I just can’t imagine that a judge is going to take kindly to this. I mean, I’m not a judge. If I ever was a judge, I would not. I mean, it’s just like, look, if you disagree, judges say all the time, look, that’s my decision.

If you don’t like it, take me up, right? Objection. They say overruled. They say sustain. You don’t like run out of the courthouse and say, you just overruled my objection. I’m not participating in the trial. You lose your law license.

Bert Martinez:
Right, right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s just like you can’t do this.

Bert Martinez:
Let me ask you this, and I know I already asked you once, but I want to kind of finish up with this.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Sure.

Bert Martinez:
This, obviously this situation is not going to get better for. Might be, may not get better for the next three or four years till we have a new administration. But if you have, if you were going to give advice to somebody who gets pulled over by eyes or gets somehow gets ends up getting detained, what is your advice?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Well, the advice for anyone that could fall into this Immigration and Customs Enforcement in brolio is you need to talk to a lawyer right away. You should have like a safety plan. You really need to have other people in your lives that know where you are at any time. But you should have like your, you could have like your iPhone trackers on like, like, you know, it sucks to have to live this way, but a lot of the cases I’m finding is just like witnesses, like we saw a guy get thrown in a van. People need to document the behavior of the government, police officers, ice, arm, it doesn’t matter. You have a first amendment right to record these government officials engaging in government activities. Don’t be violent to them, you know, but you, you have the right to protest your government for grievances. First time, right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You can sit there and record them, but don’t impede an investigation. Don’t do that. But if you’re pulled over, you don’t have to tell them who you are. It’s none of their goddamn business who you are, citizen or non citizen alike. You know, you can. That was like a YouTube video going around and said like, shut the up. It’s like some, some lawyer out there. It’s like, what do you do when they ask you where the drugs are? You shut the up.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s the same thing. Shut your mouth. You don’t have to talk to them. You can be polite. You’re gonna say, excuse me, sir, I’m not answering your questions. Am I free to leave? You don’t have to say anything. You can just say, am I free to leave? If they say no, you’re effectively arrested. If they ask you your name, you’re at.

You don’t have to. I remaining silent. I want to talk to a lawyer. Now, what very likely could happen is you get arrested anyway.

Bert Martinez:
Sure.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
But what’s happening to some of these people is they’re like, they’re volunteering information. They’ll answer the question like, oh, I’m undocumented. Okay, now you just gave them a basis to arrest you, Right? But why cooperate? They’re not following the law a lot in these cases, right. And people just need to understand their rights. And a lot of my clients, it’s just because they’re from countries where you have to answer the question of law enforcement. You just have to, you don’t have to here. There’s no requirement. I mean, the mayor of New York, he gave a know your rights, you know, dissertation a couple days ago, and Kristi Noem said he, he was violating the Constitution or something like that.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
No, what he said, chapter and verse is the state of the law. I. I guess like explaining the law to somebody. Is it. Are they gonna go arrest the law professors now? When they tell people what their constitutional rights are at a seminar, I mean, well, why are we playing? Why are we hiding the ball from everybody? Like, and that’s the thing is in order to, in order to do what they’re seeking to do, you need to cheat people out of their rights. You need to avoid courts at all costs. You need to avoid abiding by judges orders. You need to ship people off in the middle of the night when they don’t know where they are.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
It’s a big disinformation campaign. And I told somebody, I had a friend, a guy I play hockey with, he was asking about my cases. And he said, well, it must be. It should be a crime if you’re. He’s saying all this stuff. And I was like, listen, I know this guy is a gun. I said, imagine if you went hunting and you got pulled over and you’re like you’re hunting. Like your hunting license and your gun permit was like in your glove box.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And they’re like, oh, do you have a license for that shotgun I just saw? You’re like, yeah, I have my license over here, let me get it. And they just grabbed you, threw you in a van, took you away, didn’t feed you, didn’t make, make a phone call, you couldn’t talk to a lawyer and you wound up in some for profit prison in like Texas. And a month later your family had no idea where you were. You’re just effectively in prison with no due process. And he’s like, there’s no way they could do that to me. I have Second Amendment rights. I’m like, yes, my concept, Fourth and fifth Amendment rights. The same thing is happening to them, right? Yeah.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So imagine if like somebody like Newsom just said, you know what, I’m going to go, I’m going to do like Trump did, round up all the gun holders. I don’t care about the second Amendment, throw them in prison, destroy their guns. I mean, how is that any different? That is equally wrong.

Bert Martinez:
Right?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Just people need to wake the up because this isn’t, I don’t think this is just about non citizen. They’re easy targets, but they’re going after the colleges, they’re going after big law firms, they’re going after science. I mean, there’s just so many areas in which we’re under siege. Women’s reproductive freedom, you know, gay Mary. It goes on and on and on and on. But the easiest people to pick on are people can’t vote. Right. If you’re not a citizen, you can’t vote.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
If you’re undocumented, you’re going to run scared. And people just need to talk to lawyers, they need to be brave enough to understand their rights. Citizens. It’s not a crime to tell somebody they have constitutional rights. And you know, it is troubling. But at the same time, like so many people reached out to me about Annie Lopez. I had all these Babson alums reaching out to me. Like some guy, John Atwood, unbelievable.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
He wanted to like fly, you know, fly equipment out to her so she could continue her education. Meeting with the president of the university. There are people all over the world reaching out. People all different political persuasions just saying this is so wrong. But more importantly, a lot of people in these other countries, these newspapers I’m talking to, they’re like, should we ever travel to the United States and spend our money? Should I ever send my kid, he can go to Oxford or you can go to Harvard. Well, where are you going to go? Are they going to arrest you in London? They arrest you in England, just throw you in a jail cell because of the color of your skin. Right. Maybe people are going to make.

And then where are they going to keep where they’re going to further their career? Some of the brightest minds in the world don’t want to come to the United States right now. And that’s it. It’s really sad.

Bert Martinez:
Well, look what they’re doing to Mark Kelly. Right? Senator Mark Kelly, I believe he was. I can’t remember the rank, but he served in the military, NASA. And so the same thing. He got together with a bunch of other politicians and basically just explained the law that you do not have to follow an unlawful order, which is part of the military code of justice or whatever. And look what they’re trying to do to him.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Like, they’re saying that’s treason, but. Right. In the capitalism.

Bert Martinez:
Right, right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
So which is it?

Bert Martinez:
Right. It is just. It is just one of these things where I don’t think anybody would have foreseen this level of corruption and abuse. And, and it’s just crazy. And, and I, I think that somebody who’s tracking all the pardons that Trump has done here, the first almost 12 months in office, it’s close to 1500 plus different pardons. Some of these people, I suspect, paid him something or will pay him something.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And I know it’s like, it’s not even like it seems like it’s overt corruption, but, oh, it is. At the end of the day, I mean, elections have consequences. I mean, Kamala Harris was warning about this.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Most of our campaign was about, he’s got to go after this person because he literally said, I’m going to have the Attorney general prosecute these people. And look what’s happening. Oh, wow. He’s actually doing what he said he was going to do. What a big surprise there, right?

Bert Martinez:
When it comes to retribution, I think he’s pretty good about keeping his word. The other stuff, not so not so good. Again, it’s one of those things where one of his campaign promises is that he was going to reduce the electric bill and groceries by 50%. Of course, they’ve gone in the other direction. But putting that aside, because politicians constantly make promises they can’t keep. The corruption, really, I don’t know. I don’t know if the reason I hesitate calling it corruption, because on one side it is corruption, but since he cannot be prosecuted because the Supreme Court said a president is essentially above the law, then he’s allowed to do whatever he wants.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Well, yeah, because he can label it official government business or classify. I mean, it is what it is. I mean, the Supreme Court had a decision to make. I don’t. I didn’t. I didn’t agree with it. But again, I mean, you got to follow the law. I mean, that’s the whole point.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
If all. If you don’t like it, there’s another case might come along where they curtail it a little bit. That’s what happens a lot. Sometimes precedent is too broadly construed, and then just through the history of how it’s being interpreted, the Supreme Court, you know, curbs it in a little bit. And that could happen again here. Sure. Maybe they assume there’d be more good faith or maybe just he’s just such an anomaly. They would rather.

I don’t know if the decision was necessarily just to let President Trump do what he’s doing. Sometimes the court doesn’t necessarily want to react to an individual situation. They look at it like the larger scale, like, over the course of history, how is this decision going to unfold?

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know, the Supreme Voice, a big deal. I went to it once. It was like the honor of my life to be at that. You know, to go on the Supreme Court and, you know, again, the rule. It’s a big. It’s just a big deal. You know, like the only song I ever, you know, get emotional. I always get, you know, it’s always, always a national anthem.

Sure. You know, it’s a big deal. But look at it. It’s red, it’s white, it’s blue. It’s so symbolic of all these different things. It’s like, you know, like, you know, the cornucopia of America. People from all different walks of life, people that, you know, different thoughts in there. You know, you can be a scientist, you can be a musician.

You can. You can do nothing with your life anyway. You do kind of do whatever you want. It’s just like, right now, it just seems like everything is being forced in one direction. It’s. It’s really boring. It’s like everyone eating vanilla ice cream the rest of their lives. And it really, like, he came about because he was, like, supposedly a change agent, and people bought into it.

But, I mean, I have people in my family, they’re like, I’m voting for Bernie Sanders, and then they voted for Donald Trump. It’s like they’re not even remotely close to the same ideology. Right. But they just thought, you know, it was something different to vote for.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And you know, there’ll be something different in the future. But really, like, like you said you were, you know, more of a Republican. I mean, you guys gotta, you know, you can change your party. I mean, maybe that, maybe that’s the opportunity now. I think a lot of people are jumping ship, so.

Bert Martinez:
They are.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And apparently, like Marjorie Taylor Greene said that off the record, a lot of them don’t agree with this stuff. Well, then why do you keep voting for it?

Bert Martinez:
Right?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
The Senate can say no, the House representative can say no. And maybe that’ll happen soon. But if not, I mean, one thing is you got the midterms. If you don’t like the thing, way things are going, even if you’re a Republican, don’t vote for that party again. Vote for somebody else. And that can at least slow it down a bit.

Bert Martinez:
But I think, I think a lot of people are hanging their hopes on the midterms. Before we finish, I want to, I want to talk. Just a quick shout out. It’s called your nonprofit Mass deportation defense.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Mass deportation defense.org and that clinic we’re raising money right now for Ani Lopez. We have a lot of the people that were victimized at the Austin car wash, but we’re going to be helping people eventually nationwide. I have a, I have a, I have a significant heavy hitting litigation director. I can’t announce his or her name yet. Joining me in the springtime, we’re going to be looking for cases, people from all over the country that have experienced these horrific immigration abuses. Initially, we’re going to be defending people, but the reason the name came about was it’s the antithesis to mass deportation. Now I was like, what is that? It’s mass deportation defense. So we’re going to basically try to counterbalance all these immigration efforts throughout the country to just illegally arrest and seek to deport people with no due process of law.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
And just because we get them out of jail doesn’t mean it’s the end. These people that I represent, they’re just traumatized. They’re seeing psychiatrists. They don’t even want to go out outside anymore. They think they’re going to just get thrown in vans again. Nightmare. And it’s like, why did this happen to you? Because you decided to get a scholarship and go to school in Boston, Massachusetts. This is why that happened to you.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You trusted the airport not to breach. You know, your, you know, somebody at TSA ratted out a college student, said, go arrest her you couldn’t leave her the alone.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I mean. I mean, there’s just so many of these cases, and I feel like so many people in the country are just crying out for justice. And that’s our goal really, is to just be. You know, we have the dot org and the dot com. The dot com is basically what it does. It does some merchandise. It kind of helps people generate money for their cases. So, like Jamie Rosa, we had hats and T shirts.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
A lot of people, like, they want to buy something. You know, the autobond does this. It’s kind of like we’re trying to, like, have a narrative where people can go to share their story. So what we do is we. We have. We have like, Ani Lopez. We talk about her story. We actually have merchandise that’s going to come up for her, too.

And it says, ani’s dream is my dream. You know, it is. I mean, her dreams could be everyone’s dreams. I mean, I said she could be any. You know, Ani could be anybody. It’s like, kind of. Her name is. Looks like Annie, but it’s pronounced Annie or Ani, but.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know, like, if you ever get the chance to talk to her, meet her, she’s just such a wonderful person. And it’s like so many people like this, you know, that they’re in the shadows and nobody knows about. Get to know your. Your immigrant neighbor. Get to know these people are, you know, they really are friends. And it’s just like. It’s just sad to me. I mean, a lot of ways I always joke around, like, criminal immigration for me is almost like it’s like purgatory for a criminal defense lawyer.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
You know what I mean? It’s like most of the people I represent, the worst thing they ever did was wanted a better life. Maybe they crossed the border. Maybe they committed a misdemeanor at one point. It’s not. It wasn’t always a crime.

Bert Martinez:
Right.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
But you can’t go arrest somebody 20 years later because they might have trespassed in your backyard. And that’s effectively what’s happening, is people who might have done something wrong long ago are just being grabbed now. And this is a civil enforcement. This is supposed to be civil immigration, Customs Enforcement. They’re making arrests for civil violations of the law. Imagine getting arrested now because you drove 20 miles over the speed limit and thrown in a van. And it’s civil. And you’re like, I’m in a van.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
I was 20. Two agents surrounded me. They had masks over their faces. They wouldn’t let me make a phone call. They wouldn’t let me eat. They wouldn’t give me medication. They laughed at my loved one, said, well, let them know if your loved one dies, leave us alone. And then you just herded around like cattle throughout the United States.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
That is the functional equivalent of what is happening all over America to non citizens being arrested by this administration. And people just need to know that the labeling of criminal legal alien is false most of the time. Most of these violations are not crimes. And should people be treated this way for something that is on par with a speeding ticket?

Bert Martinez:
Right. I love it. I appreciate your stopping by. If somebody wanted to come to your law, if somebody wanted to talk to you or you with your team, what’s the website for your law firm?

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Yeah, it’s Rubinpom.com R u b I n p o m dot com. That’s short for pomelo, which is P o m e R L e a U. Todd Pomelo in Boston, Massachusetts.

Bert Martinez:
Great, Todd. Thank you so much. Looking. We’ll, you know, we’ll have you back again. Give us some updates. Thank you so much.

Lawyer Todd Pomerleau:
Absolutely. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot for having me on here and for all those of you watching who hopefully you had a good time. Thanks so much.

Bert Martinez:
All right, man, we’re out. Thank you so much.