Summary: El Paso County files FOIA lawsuit against ICE County attorney Christina Sanchez leads legal action Three Socorro warehouses sold to DHS for $123 million The El Paso County Commissioners Court has approved a request to file a lawsuit related to immigration detention centers against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The lawsuit approved by the commissions on Monday, April 6, is related to ICE and DHS failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request for information pertaining to planned immigrant detention centers in El Paso. The federal lawsuit will be filed in the Western District of Texas on behalf of the county alleging the violation of the FOIA. County Attorney Christina Sanchez is seeking information including site maps, applicable permitting requirements and processes, public notice, public comment periods and meeting or discussion related to the proposed site of a massive immigration detention center in Socorro, Texas. The County Attorney's Office also is investigating whether ICE had followed an environmental assessment. But to date, county officials had not received a response to its requests for public information, Sanchez said. The commissioners had directed Sanchez to produce a report detailing what was known about the planned immigration detention centers in the county. Her office had filed the Freedom of Information Act request for documents as part of this report. The report was prepared following a resolution adopted by the court on Feb. 3 over plans to transform three warehouses into a massive immigration detention center in Socorro. Over 200 El Pasoans turned out to voice their opposition to the planned detention center during public comment in the commissioners court on Jan. 26 The three massive warehouses in Socorro had been sold by the company El Paso Logistics 2 LLC on Jan. 27 to the DHS for $123 million. The site is proposed to hold 8,500 people. DHS moving forward with Socorro detention center While the purchasing of new warehouses was paused by the Department of Homeland Security, plans are advancing for the transformation of the massive warehouses in Socorro into immigration detention centers. DHS has not provided a full timeline for how it will proceed with converting the three warehouses in Socorro into detention centers. If completed, El Paso County would have around 13,500 beds for immigrants detained under the Trump administration's immigration enforcement operations. The controversial Camp East Montana in East El Paso is the current largest immigration detention center in the United States, holding up to 5,000 people. Jeff Abbott covers the border for the El Paso Times and can be reached at:[email protected]; @palabrasdeabajo on Twitter or @palabrasdeabajo.bsky.social on Bluesky. This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: El Paso County sues ICE over detention center plans Reporting by Jeff Abbott, El Paso Times / El Paso Times USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Summary: Supreme Court vacates DC circuit ruling on Bannon conviction Justice Department supports dismissal of Bannon contempt charges Bannon convicted for defying congressional Jan. 6 subpoena The Supreme Court on Monday cleared a path for Stephen K. Bannon’s effort, backed by the Justice Department, to dismiss his conviction for defying a congressional subpoena related to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. In a brief, unsigned order Monday morning, the court vacated a judgment by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upholding Bannon’s conviction. The high court sent the case back to the appeals court for reconsideration in light of a motion to dismiss that the Justice Department filed two months ago. Bannon, an influential right-wing podcaster and former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, spent four months in prison in 2024 after a jury found him guilty on two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress. Bannon had refused to respond to demands for testimony and documents by a House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, the jury found. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2024 upheld the convictions, and the full appeals court later declined to rehear the case. In October, Bannon appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court had previously denied his request to postpone his prison sentence pending his appeal. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the Justice Department has sought to undo a number of criminal cases brought by prosecutors in prior administrations, employing sweeping orders as well as smaller-scale interventions. In one of his first acts in office, Trump issued a blanket pardon to more than 1,500 people who had been convicted or charged in connection with Jan. 6 — a series of cases that had emerged from the largest investigation in the Justice Department’s history. Trump has directed a purge of prosecutors and federal investigators who worked on those cases. More akin to its intervention in the Bannon case, the department told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in September that it would no longer defend the conviction of Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser during his first administration, who served a four-month sentence for defying a congressional subpoena. The department also recently agreed to give former national security adviser Michael Flynn a payout to settle claims that he was wrongfully prosecuted as part of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Bannon’s most recent petition to the Supreme Court argued that he was following the advice of his attorney in refusing to cooperate with the congressional subpoena. He also says he believed that records the committee sought were protected by executive privilege, a constitutional principle that shields the internal communications of presidents’ top aides. The trial judge did not allow him to use those arguments as a defense in court. This time, the Justice Department — which had prosecuted Bannon’s case under the Biden administration — is supporting his bid to reverse his convictions. In a February filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to reverse the appeals court ruling and send the case back to trial court for dismissal. Such an outcome “is in the interests of justice,” Sauer wrote. The Justice Department has concurrently laid the groundwork for that dismissal in lower court. In another sign of shifting priorities, Justice Department attorneys moved last month to dismiss charges against two former Louisville police officers accused of wrongdoing related to the 2020 raid that led to Breonna Taylor’s death. And officials have taken other steps to walk back consent decrees with police departments across the country secured during the Biden administration. Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report.  

A federal civil jury on April 2 awarded a $307.6 million verdict to a Detroit man who alleges he suffered in prison for more than two years because the state's former prison health care contractor would not pay to reverse his colostomy. Former Michigan inmate Kohchise Jackson alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2019 that he had to serve his entire prison sentence with a stinky and leaky plastic bag attached to his side because the state's former prison health care contractor, Corizon Health, did not want to pay for surgery to reverse his colostomy, as a cost-cutting measure. A jury deliberated just a little over two hours in federal court in Detroit April 2 before returning the verdict. It awarded $300 million in punitive damages against defendant CHS TX, Inc., the company that purchased Corizon Health after its 2023 bankruptcy, and $100,000 in punitive damages against Dr. Keith Papendick, who was Corizon's "director of utilization management" while Jackson was in prison from 2017 to 2019. The jury also awarded $7.5 million in compensatory damages against CHS TX. "I think that this jury recognized the basic human rights and the constitutional rights of everybody," Detroit attorney Jonathan Marko, who represented Jackson, said after the verdict. "This is a warning shot across the bow to for-profit health care companies" that get their money from taxpayers, through the prison and jail system, Marko said. During the trial, a New York City man who was a top official with Corizon, Isaac Lefkowitz, refused to answer questions when he was called to the witness stand, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, court records show. "This is a criminal enterprise," Marko told jurors during his closing argument. Lefkowitz "was scared of being criminally prosecuted in this courthouse." Adam Masin, a New York attorney representing defendants CHS TX and Papendick, told jurors during his closing that Lefkowitz's appearance in the case was just one of a series of distractions in a trial he called "a circus" and "a spectacle." Lefkowitz had nothing to do with Jackson's lawsuit because he did not become a Corizon official until 2021, long after Jackson was released from prison and the same year the MDOC's five-year, $716 million contract with Corizon ended, Masin argued. Lefkowitz is also not currently a director of CHS TX and has no current role with the defendant company, Masin told jurors. The trial also heard testimony from former Corizon employees, not all of whom worked in Michigan prisons, who testified for Jackson and the defendants. Masin, who declined to comment when reached by telephone after the verdict, described much of the plaintiff's case as "random, unproven stories ... intended to distract you." He said Jackson's lawyers "relied too much on self-serving prison gossip." The Michigan Department of Corrections was not a defendant in the case. Jackson, 44, of Detroit, who alleged deliberate indifference to his serious health needs, was paroled in May 2019 after serving two years and two months in prisons near Jackson and St. Louis. He developed a hole in his colon in 2016, before he was sent to prison. It happened while he was in the St. Clair County Jail in Port Huron, awaiting trial on charges that included assault with a dangerous weapon. Doctors outside prison treated Jackson with a colostomy, which diverted his colon and the human waste it carried to a plastic bag, through a hole in his side. Jackson alleges he was supposed to have surgery to reverse the colostomy in February 2017. Instead, Corizon left him with it. He alleges the bag frequently leaked, sending waste onto himself and his bunk; smelled bad; and he sometimes had to clean out the bag and reuse it when prison replacements were not available, making his prison stay traumatic and dangerous. "Nobody wanted to be my bunkie, for sure," Jackson told the Detroit Free Press in a 2019 interview. "I didn't get along well with others, because of the bag and the smell," which resulted in "a couple of altercations," he said. Marko said the case was about justice not just for Jackson but for tens of thousands of prisoners who have received inadequate health care while in prison from contractors seeking to maximize their profits. He asked the jury to award Jackson $75 million in compensatory damages and $650 million in punitive damages. "You have the power to stop them," Marko said of prison health care providers who have harmed prisoners, in urging jurors to return a large verdict. "Claw back that taxpayer money." Masin argued that at least 1 million Americans live with colostomy bags and there is no medical consensus on how quickly a colostomy should be reversed. Performing the surgery would have come with medical risks, Masin told jurors. What's clear, he said, was that there was no pressing medical need for the reversal surgery, which Jackson had done after he was released from prison and suffered no ill effects. It was also false that Corizon would save money by denying Jackson the reversal surgery, Masin said. If approved while Jackson was in prison, the surgery would have been paid for by Medicaid, he said. "What if this man had a life sentence?" asked Ann Arbor attorney Ian Cross, who also represents Jackson. "Is it fine for him just to wear a bag for the rest of his life?" This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: “Jury awards former Michigan inmate $307.6M in prison health care suit” USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect