Tag Archives: Department of Corrections

Washington Post: D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge

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A federal grand jury refused to indict a man who threw a sandwich at a federal officer, and grand jurors refused three times to indict a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent.

President Donald Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement on the streets of D.C. is meeting resistance in the city’s federal courthouse, where magistrate judges have admonished prosecutors for violating defendants’ rights and court rules, and grand jurors have repeatedly refused to issue indictments.

On Tuesday, a federal grand jury refused to indict a former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal law enforcement agent in an incident this month that went viral on social media, according to two people with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. Prosecutors had sought to charge Sean Charles Dunn with a felony count of assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer.

Trump declared a crime emergency this month, giving federal law enforcement agencies and National Guard members unprecedented authority to patrol the nation’s capital, while also enlisting the District’s 3,100-member police force to assist with immigration enforcement. More than 1,000 arrests have followed, according to the White House. Meanwhile, D.C.’s top prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, ordered her staff to file the stiffest possible charges in every case.

But there are emerging signs that not all of the arrests will stand up to scrutiny in court.

Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case. Days later, a federal magistrate judge said an arrest in Northeast Washington was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.”

While judges are known to criticize prosecutors from time to time, grand jurors only in rare cases refuse to issue an indictment, which requires them to find only probable cause that a crime was committed, the lowest evidentiary bar in criminal cases. Instances of failed indictments have begun to crop up more since Trump took office this year. Grand jurors in Los Angeles have rejected indictments of people who were arrested for protesting the administration’s immigration enforcement actions, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The July 22 scuffle at issue in D.C. federal court occurred weeks before Trump’s law enforcement order, but the grand jurors were presented with the case this month just as federal agents were descending on Washington.

Prosecutors alleged that Sydney Reid was obstructing and recording agents from the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they attempted to arrest a gang member being released from the D.C. jail who was slated for deportation. An FBI agent scraped her hand against a wall amid the fracas, and prosecutors planned to charge Reid with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer, a felony offense punishable by up to eight years in prison.

Under the Fifth Amendment, however, charges that carry potential penalties of more than a year in prison must be approved by a grand jury. At least 12 members must vote to authorize an indictment. After striking out with the D.C. grand jury, prosecutors dropped the effort to charge Reid with a felony and instead filed a misdemeanor charge that does not require grand jury approval. The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is one year in jail.

“After Ms. Reid was wrongfully arrested, the ICE agent told her, ‘You should have just stayed home and minded your business,’” Reid’s public defenders, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, said in a statement. “As a United States citizen and a compassionate person, caring about fellow D.C. residents getting snatched off the streets by ICE agents is her business and should be of concern to all human beings.”

They added: “The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word. We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid’s name.”

Several recent cases, including Dunn’s, have involved the same felony statute that prosecutors tried to apply to Reid’s case.

Pirro declined to speculate about how juries in D.C., where 90 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential race, might respond to criminal cases as the federal crackdown continues.

“The only thing that I can say is we are prosecutors. We are the tip of the spear. We are the ones who take these cases into court, and the burden is on us to prove these cases, and we welcome that burden — beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro said at a news conference Tuesday. “Sometimes a jury will buy it and sometimes they won’t. So be it. That’s the way the process works.”

A spokesman for Pirro did not say whether federal prosecutors would try to present the Dunn case to a grand jury a second time. The spokesman, Timothy Lauer, alleged that a government lawyer had violated a court rule requiring confidentiality in grand jury proceedings by disclosing the decision not to indict Dunn. The grand jury’s move in that case was first reported by the New York Times. Dunn’s attorney, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.

U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey said at a hearing this month that prosecutors should have promptly notified the court about the grand jury’s decision not to indict Reid but that they held off for days, violating a court rule. “I’ve taken up that issue with the U.S. attorney’s office,” Harvey said last week.

But the most pointed criticisms of Trump’s law enforcement surge have come from Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui, who has castigated law enforcement officials for wearing masks while tackling and arresting a Venezuelan national who worked as a food-delivery driver, for disobeying an order the judge issued this week to release a woman from the D.C. jail, and for arresting and jailing a 37-year-old because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”

“I’d say we live in a surreal world right now,” Faruqui said at a court hearing for Christian Enrique Carías Torres, who was taken down by masked federal agents as he exited a Bluestone Lane coffee shop with a delivery order, an arrest that was captured on video by a Washington Post reporter.

“This is not consistent with what I understand the United States of America to be,” the judge told Carías Torres. “You should be treated with basic human dignity. We don’t have a secret police.”

Pirro’s office said in a court filing that Carías Torres ran after officers approached him, struggled as he was being taken down and tried to flee from a police vehicle after being handcuffed, adding that he had missed his immigration court hearings since entering the country in 2023.

Violent crime is down 27 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2024, according to D.C. police data, and has declined 51 percent when measuring the year-over-year period since Trump issued his order Aug. 11.

The president has painted a portrait of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” in the District, blaming years of passive policing by local authorities and lenient criminal justice policies from Democratic officials.

“But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want,” Trump said of D.C. police as he announced his moves. He said criminals in the city are rough and tough, “but we’re rougher and tougher.”

Carías Torres was charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers, just as Dunn and Reid had been, after an officer injured his head while helping take him to the ground. Faruqui ordered that Carías Torres be released pending trial, acknowledging that ICE would have an opportunity to take him into custody to enforce a removal order issued by an immigration court last year.

In another case, federal prosecutors charged Kristal Rios Esquivel with a felony violation of the same statute, which makes it illegal to assault federal officers. Her alleged offense started when she walked through a door that was marked “staff only” at the National Zoo’s bird house, tripping an alarm. As National Zoo Park Police officers arrested her for unlawful entry, Rios Esquivel spat on two of them and kicked one, prosecutors alleged. Her attorney has criticized the arrest as an instance of overpolicing.

Rios Esquivel was held for five days in the D.C. jail before making her initial appearance Monday in Faruqui’s courtroom, which Faruqui said was bad enough. The judge ordered Rios Esquivel released pending trial, but the D.C. Department of Corrections did not free her the same day. Faruqui threatened to impose sanctions in a scathing order issued Tuesday that said officials had subjected Rios Esquivel to illegal detention, and she was released.

“What is especially troubling is that this is not even the first time in the past four months that the Court has encountered this same problem of false imprisonment,” Faruqui wrote, citing another case from April.

At yet another court hearing scrutinizing police tactics in D.C., Faruqui reprimanded federal prosecutors this week for charging Torez Riley with illegally possessing firearms. The judge found that D.C. police officers, who were on patrol with federal agents, violated Riley’s privacy rights by searching his bag, where they found two guns. Riley had previously been convicted of weapons offenses, prosecutors said.

Police said in court documents that Riley’s bag had been searched in part because it appeared to contain something heavy. But that observation was not enough to show probable cause that Riley had committed a crime, the court found.

It was “without a doubt, the most illegal search I’ve seen in my life,” said Faruqui, a former D.C. federal prosecutor, adding that Riley had been jailed and kept away from his three children and pregnant wife for a week because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”

Pirro’s office then filed court papers to dismiss the case, and the judge ordered Riley released from a D.C. jail facility.

A spokesman for Pirro said that as soon as she “was shown the body-worn camera footage on Friday, she ordered the dismissal of the charges.” The motion to dismiss was filed Monday.

In response to Faruqui’s criticisms, Pirro said in a statement: “This judge has a long history of bending over backwards to release dangerous felons in possession of firearms and on frequent occasions he has downplayed the seriousness of felons who possess illegal firearms and the danger they pose to our community.”

But Faruqui also admonished Riley over his firearm possession. “You will die, you will kill somebody, or you will end up in jail,” the judge said.

Riley is set to face consequences in Maryland, where Faruqui said authorities would use what they learned in the “blatantly illegal” D.C. search to show he violated his probation in an earlier gun possession case. A bench warrant was issued Monday over the probation violation, according to records from Prince George’s County Circuit Court.

Riley’s wife, Crashawna Williams, said she took a week off from the beauty classes she’s enrolled in to deal with her husband’s case while taking care of their boys, ages 3, 8 and 12.

“I feel like he shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” Williams said. But, she added, what could they do?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/27/trump-crime-surge-court-cases

No paywall:

D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge
A federal magistrate judge said one arrest in D.C. was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and another lacked “basic human dignity.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/ar-AA1Lk9uv

Salon: Florida desensitized my family to cruel and unusual punishment

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It’s not just at Alligator Alcatraz. Horrific conditions exist throughout the Sunshine State’s prisons

In the weeks since Alligator Alcatraz opened deep within the Everglades in southern Florida, there have been mounting reports of the horrific conditions inside: Maggots in the food, sewage overflowing near beds, people having to remove fecal matter from the toilets with their bare hands due to a lack of water. To protest the conditions, detainees have launched a hunger strike, which likely continues, despite the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts to deny and suppress information about it.

Construction at Alligator Alcatraz could be halted indefinitely in the wake of a lawsuit filed by environmental groups and an Indigenous tribe arguing the detention center’s development on protected wetlands violates environmental laws. Another suit brought by the ACLU claims detainees’ constitutional rights are being violated. Florida seems undeterred. The state is planning to build a second detention center at a correctional institution that was shuttered in 2021 after numerous reports of excessive violence and abuse of inmates by guards. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is calling the facility “the deportation depot.”

This scary reality is snowballing in its brutality as President Donald Trump and his administration, Republican politicians and large swaths of the American population continue to broaden the cultural profile of who we deem dangerous enough to lock up. Several states are developing similar concentration camps, including one at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, and an Indiana facility dubbed “The Speedway Slammer.” I’m not surprised. 

I’m also not surprised that Florida is leading the way in building these facilities. The U.S. has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and Florida locks up a higher percentage of its people than any independent democratic country on earth. To date, no other state has spent as much effort collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the second Trump administration. Following DeSantis’ special session on immigration in January, the Sunshine State passed laws requiring local jurisdictions to enter into agreements with ICE and offering a $1,000 bonus to local officers participating in ICE raids and operations. Immigration detention in Florida quadrupled in less than six months. As the state runs out of space, Florida jails are being used to house detainees, exacerbating overcrowded conditions and forcing people to sleep on the floor. When ICE staff opposed the plans to use Florida jails as ICE detention facilities because it would violate current federal regulations and standards, a local sheriff dismissed the claims, calling them “woke.” 

Prisoners in the Florida Department of Corrections system are often held under many of the same inhumane conditions present at Alligator Alcatraz. My uncle is one of them. 

I’ve visited him in facilities up and down the state: In detention centers; maximum security units; psych wards; private correctional institutions; facilities with barbed wire fences, search dogs and rooftops decorated with armed guards; places in towns so small the only store for miles is a Piggly Wiggly.

I don’t pretend that many of Florida’s prisoners are not guilty of the crimes they’ve been charged with, and I won’t downplay the severity of the crimes committed — my uncle’s included. Unlike the detainees held in Alligator Alcatraz, they have ostensibly been given due process, though we could argue about the justice system’s version of the right that is often applied to Black, brown and poor people. Regardless of the circumstances, however, I believe every person deserves to be treated with dignity and humanity. I don’t believe that violence and cruelty has ever nudged anyone toward a better version of themselves.

One Wednesday in May, I woke up to frantic voicemails from my mom. My uncle had been stabbed multiple times, and she wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. It had happened two days earlier, but she’d just found out that morning from a fellow prisoner’s girlfriend. Details were spotty. My uncle was an inmate at Dade Correctional Institution, a facility in south Miami deemed the “deadliest in Florida” by the Miami Herald following an investigation into a record number of inmate deaths in 2017. An earlier investigation into the facility revealed that officers had made “sport” of tormenting mentally ill inmates, including forcing inmates into a specially rigged, scalding hot shower as punishment for unruly behavior. 

My uncle had been transferred to the facility from another prison a few years ago because Dade Correctional Institution has an Americans With Disabilities Act unit and he, a lifer, has gone deaf from decades of loud, echoing conditions. 

Since he’s deaf, he didn’t hear the man — or men — coming up on him with the knife. Despite our many requests, the Florida Department of Corrections has not gotten him a hearing aid that doesn’t beep loudly in his ears, so he prefers to stay in his own, soundless world. 

I imagined him walking into the same yard where we’ve sat for visits, thinking about how he’ll get to pet his favorite rescue dog later, the one corrections officers  bring in for training. He prefers the dogs to humans, saying they’re the only redeeming thing about the place. In my mind, he was thinking about the dog when he was surrounded by the other men. He was thinking about the dog as the knife pierced his skin, plunging into the back of his neck and then into his ear. I imagined and reimagined the scene, watching him get caught by surprise, his eyes widening at the pain. 

Did he fall to the ground? Call out for help? The woman who called my mom said four other inmates were also stabbed, and that corrections officers were involved, but it’s impossible to verify. 

There are so many questions. Did the officers provide the knife? Join in on the stabbing? Simply look the other way?

My mom and siblings and I called and emailed each of the prison’s classification officers, coordinators and wardens. This was not the first time in my uncle’s 30-year incarceration that we’ve had to hound the Florida Department of Corrections for answers about his well-being. It was not the first time we’ve received calls from another inmate’s girlfriend or relative about my uncle. There was the time, a few years ago at another facility, when he was taken to the medical unit for lesions in his stomach. He was kept on a gurney in a hallway for days without treatment. He was in so much pain he thought he might die, so he had a friend get in touch with us to let us know. 

Then, like now, we called and tried to get information from the staff and were given the run around. The person with answers was always on break. The warden was never available. We were treated like nuisances for caring. They informed me I was not on “the list” to receive information, a bold-faced lie. I pleaded with anyone I could get on the line. They gave me one-word answers and told me to calm down in an almost bored tone. I cried, begging them to have some compassion, to imagine it was their loved one who was hurt. 

I canceled a few work calls. Without thinking much about it, I texted my co-worker and told her my uncle was stabbed. She expressed alarm and concern. I kept calling, relaying information to my mom and siblings. I reached out to the media, including the writer who investigated Dade Correctional Institution years ago. She recommended that I request copies of my uncle’s inmate file, which is public record, and any incident reports involving his name. I did this and got nothing. I tried again — still, nothing. Unfortunately, none of this was newsworthy, and my sources inside were not considered credible, so the reporters I spoke with didn’t have much to go on. I reached out to an advocacy group and received a reply three months later stating that, due to a lack of resources and too much demand, they could not help me.

A coordinator at the prison eventually told us my uncle was alive, that he had received medical treatment and was being held in solitary confinement for his safety. We were given nothing else. When I asked why we weren’t notified of the incident, I was told that it’s the inmate’s responsibility to notify loved ones — as if he could call us after being stabbed multiple times, and while he was in solitary confinement with a disability that makes it difficult to communicate by phone. 

Several weeks later, my uncle was transferred to another facility at the opposite end of the state. He had 28-day-old sutures he contemplated removing himself because they itched so badly. My fury was exhausting. My family and I stopped talking about the incident and went back to business as usual, putting money on his commissary, sending him books and figuring out how to get messages to him via the new facility’s byzantine communications systems. I dropped any hope of trying to get information about what happened, even from my uncle, who, speaking on a recorded line, just said, “Shit happens in here.” The upside, for him: At least the new facility has air conditioning.

The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, including the denial of necessary medical care for inmates. But thanks to the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, it’s incredibly challenging for inmates to bring suits against this treatment, and just about 1% of all cases actually win. One ongoing lawsuit against Dade Correctional Institution concerns the lack of air conditioning that led to four inmates dying last year in Miami, where heat indexes can rise up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. The Florida Department of Corrections sought to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the deaths were not caused by heat, but a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed. The majority of Florida’s prison housing units are not air-conditioned.

I imagine the detainees in Alligator Alcatraz without adequate shelter or air conditioning in the middle of hurricane season in a South Florida swamp. I think of the cavalier way Republican lawmakers have denied claims about the detention camp’s conditions. I think of Isidro Perez, the 75-year-old Cuban man who died in ICE custody at the Krome Detention Center in Miami in July. I think of the elderly prisoner in a wheelchair who begged for help in the heat at Dade Correctional Institution and died after being refused medical attention. I think of all the lives we have lost to the normalization of cruel punishment, and how many more there are to lose. 

Over the last 50 years, our bureaucratic desensitization to incarceration has grown largely unchecked. Prisons are built quietly, out of sight from the public. Visiting my uncle, regardless of where he is, requires a long drive, countless forms and hours waiting, adherence to seemingly arbitrary rules that differ from place to place and can change at any moment without notice. The point is isolation, to forget about these people. To systematically dehumanize them — first prisoners, then immigrants — and to watch as the public starts to believe they don’t deserve to be treated like humans.

Florida desensitized my family to cruel and unusual punishment
It’s not just at Alligator Alcatraz. Horrific conditions exist throughout the Sunshine State’s prisons

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/17/florida-desensitized-my-family-to-cruel-and-unusual-punishment

ACLU Alaska: ICE detainee held at Anchorage jail in June is hospitalized with tuberculosis

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An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainee held during June at an Alaska Department of Corrections (DOC) facility has been hospitalized in Tacoma, Washington, with tuberculosis. The 35 individuals held at Anchorage Correctional Complex (ACC) were informed by ICE upon their return to Tacoma on June 30th that they were exposed to tuberculosis while detained in Alaska.  

Tuberculosis is a serious and highly contagious disease that mainly affects the lungs. Alaska has the highest rate of tuberculosis in the country.  

The hospitalization was uncovered by the detainee’s attorney, Sean Quirk, whose client missed two scheduled video appointments from the Tacoma ICE detention facility. Quirk was only able to confirm that his client was ill with tuberculosis after calling Tacoma-area hospitals and eventually locating his client. However, an officer from the GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the Tacoma facility, denied him access to speak with his client. The client is still hospitalized and being treated for tuberculosis.  

ACLU of Alaska attorneys were also informed by two ICE detainees during their detention at ACC that they had tested positive for latent tuberculosis and had undergone additional tuberculosis testing. 

“Whether a detainee is in custody at a prison or at a hospital, it is unacceptable and unconstitutional to deny them access to legal counsel,” said Cindy Woods, Senior Immigration Law and Policy Fellow at the ACLU of Alaska. 

Questions remain whether consistent medical screenings were conducted when detainees arrived at ACC on June 8; if correctional officers or other staff at ACC have been tested for the disease; and if proper reporting to the Alaska Department of Health has been completed. In Alaska, cases of tuberculosis are required to be reported to the State of Alaska Health Department within two days.  

During the state legislative hearing on June 20th, ACLU of Alaska and volunteer attorneys testified that detainees had documented chronic medical issues and were being denied access to care while held at ACC. During the hearing, DOC Commissioner Jennifer Winkleman confirmed that pepper spray was deployed in areas where detainees were being held, causing ongoing respiratory distress for detainees. 

This information comes on the heels of a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Alaska against DOC in May for failing to provide adequate health care for incarcerated Alaskans. It is unclear if other individuals at ACC have been exposed to or tested for tuberculosis.  

ICE detainee held at Anchorage jail in June is hospitalized with tuberculosis
The hospitalization was uncovered by the detainee’s attorney, who was denied access to his client in Tacoma, Washington.

https://www.acluak.org/en/press-releases/ice-detainee-held-anchorage-jail-june-hospitalized-tuberculosis