A federal judge who caught an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in a lie over an arrest report is stressing the need to put agents on the witness stand to expose falsehoods that paperwork alone could conceal.
“Evidentiary hearings are essential tools to ensure that a rigorous record of something closer to the truth is preserved, and to hold liars to account,” U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai wrote Monday.
In a blistering 50-page opinion and order blasting Trump’s ICE, the federal judge found the agency repeatedly violated his injunction restricting unlawful warrantless arrests.
Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney described the ruling on X as encouraging other judges to summon ICE officers in for live testimony, "concluding that without direct scrutiny and cross-examination, routine lies will go unpunished."
“Written declarations are convenient, but insufficient on their own when witnesses are willing to lie,” Kasubhai wrote.
One officer portrayed an arrest as a targeted operation against someone agents had already identified. On the stand, he acknowledged that he had not known the man’s identity before the stop and blamed inaccuracies on copying another report.
But Kashubhai flatly rejected that explanation Monday.
“He lied in an official record to facilitate the impression he was conducting a lawful warrant-based arrest,” the judge wrote, finding “intentional, coordinated falsification that would in all likelihood never have been uncovered but for this evidentiary hearing.”
Kasubhai ordered expanded disclosure of Oregon arrest records and bodycam footage to plaintiffs challenging ICE’s practices.
“Defendants, through their own conduct, have lost trust,” he wrote. The judge also admonished government lawyers defending another unlawful arrest.
“Real people’s lives and liberties are at stake and they should remember that," he concluded. "Evidentiary hearings are not first-year law school examinations where one can score points with a scattershot strategy."