Filed

CLICK HERE for SETTLEMENT information 

click here for additional RESOURCES  

للحصول على نسخة باللغة العربية من هذا الإشعار، اذهب إلى

نسخة من التسوية باللغة العربية

In 2017 hundreds of Iraqis in Michigan and throughout the country were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which intended to deport them immediately to Iraq. Most have been living in the United States for decades, but were previously ordered deported, either for technical immigration violations or for past convictions. Because the Iraqi government had long refused to issue travel documents for potential deportees, the United States has been unable to deport them. But when Iraq agreed to accept some U.S. deportees, suddenly all 1400 Iraqis with an old deportation order were targets.

The ACLU filed a class action lawsuit in federal court to stop the deportations on the grounds that they would likely result in persecution, torture or death for those deported. In 2017 Judge Mark Goldsmith issued a preliminary injunction barring deportation of Iraqis while they access the immigration court system, giving them time to file motions to reopen their immigration cases based on the changed country conditions or legal developments in the decades since their cases were decided. Subsequent orders in 2018 required the government to provide Iraqis with bond hearings and release those who had been detained longer than six months, freeing hundreds of people from detention.

But the government appealed, and in decisions in December 2018 and January 2020 the Sixth Circuit reversed, each time by a vote of 2-1. Despite the legal setbacks in the Sixth Circuit, the case has allowed hundreds of Iraqis to access the immigration court system, as well as to fight their immigration case from home, rather than in detention. Many are winning their immigration cases, and some have even become citizens. But a few have been deported, and one of our clients, Jimmy Al Dauod, died in Iraq.

Hamama Settlement Information

After several years of settlement negotiations, we reached a proposed agreement with the government. The Court preliminarily approved the settlement in June, 2024. For more information about the settlement, go here.

Go to Settlement Page

Resources

Resources for Iraqi Immigration Defense

To support Iraqis fighting removal, we have put together a resource bank of expert declarations, briefs, sample pleadings, opinions, and other materials. That is accessible here.

Go to Resource Hub

Legal Team

Hamama v. Adducci; ACLU of Michigan Attorneys Miriam Aukerman, Bonsitu Kitaba-Gaviglio, Dan Korobkin, Monica Andrade, Elaine Lewis, Rohit Rajan, and Dayja Tillman; additional attorneys include Lee Gelernt, Judy Rabinowitz, and Anand Balakrishnan of the National ACLU; Cooperating Attorneys Kimberly Scott, Wendy Richards, Russel Bucher, Erika Giroux and Sarah Reasoner of Miller Canfield, with support from Katie Witowski, Margo Schlanger of U-M Law School, David Johnson, Linda Goldberg, and William Swor; and co-counsel Nadine Yousif and Nora Youkhana of CODE Legal Aid, Susan Reed and Ruby Robinson of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, and Mariko Hirose of the International Refugee Assistance Project.

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On behalf of 15 named plaintiffs and tens of thousands of schoolchildren in Flint, the ACLU of Michigan filed a class action civil right lawsuit in Flint on Oct. 18, 2016, documenting ongoing violations of federal education laws by the State of Michigan and local school authorities. 
 

Flint families filed a complaint in U.S. District Court with attorneys from the ACLU of Michigan, the Education Law Center in New Jersey, and White & Case, a New York-based law firm. The lawsuit seeks class action status, injunctive relief and immediate remedies on behalf of thousands of Flint families. Defendants are the Michigan Department of Education, Flint Community Schools and the Genesee Intermediate School District. 

Read the ACLU of Michigan complaint on behalf of Flint schoolchildren

Learn more about the facts of the case

Read the stories of some of the plaintiffs in the case

• Chandrika Walker
• Nakiya Wakes
• Racheal Kirksey

Chandrika Walker

Chandrika Walker is a lifelong resident of Flint and a graduate of Flint schools, where she was an honor student.  She has two children, a four-year old son and a two-month old daughter.  Her son was exposed to lead tainted water for a period of almost two years.

Walker’s son tested positive for high levels of lead in his bloodstream in 2014, but the county health officials didn’t inform her about the results until nearly a year later.

“They knew for a whole year that my son had this lead in him,” and I didn’t know about it,” said Walker. “I was very upset about it. I just want to try to get all the kids all the help they need.”

“He did have rashes,” Walker recalls. “But I didn’t know it was the water. ”  She was unable to place her son in pre-school during the 2015-2016 school year, despite repeated phone calls.  He was recently enrolled in a Head Start program. 

Nakiya Wakes

Nakiya Wakes moved to Flint in 2014.  She is the mother of two children: a seven-year old boy with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a teen-age girl with epilepsy.

In 2015, Wakes became pregnant with twins.  She miscarried both children, an event she believes is connected to her own exposure to lead-tainted water.

Wakes and her children drank, cooked and bathed in lead for nearly two years.  Her children still have elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream, though at a lower concentration than was measured earlier. 

“The damage has been done,” says Wakes. “We’ve been drinking it since 2014 and this is 2016.  Our water is still poison, and we have to pay the city for our water.  We’re not in a third-world country, we should be able to drink the water.  They call this pure Michigan, and we’re getting pure poison. This is ridiculous.”

Because Flint tap water is still unsafe to drink, Wakes and her children struggle with the daily inconvenience – and indignity – of trying to live on bottled water. “You can go to the fire station and they’ve give you one gallon,” she says. “I have me and two kids and one gallon is not going to be enough for us.”

Racheal Kirksey

Racheal Kirksey is a lifelong resident of Flint. She has two children, a three-year old daughter and a six-year old son.  She lives in the city with her mother, Sharrol Little, a retired GM worker.

Kirksey’s son and daughter, both exposed to lead-tainted water, “are very sweet, bright, happy children,” she says.  But she has been disappointed in the lack of services available.  She has been trying, without success, to enroll her three-year-old daughter in pre-school.

Early childhood education and intervention is highly recommended for children who have suffered lead exposure, and it is one of the services for Flint described in Governor Snyder’s 75-point action plan in response to the Flint water crisis. Actual services, however, are hard to come by.

“She’s really ready to learn,” says Kirksey. “We can’t find an early child development center or a Head Start to put her in. Every time you call, you get a voice mail, you never get an actual person to call or return your phone call.

“There was a school right around the corner from here, it had a Head Start for children her age. They closed it.”

“What’s frustrating is, you get pamphlets in the mail, it says, ‘Coming soon a new school for children age six months to fie and six.’  You’ll call the numbers, dead voice mail, no call back.  I’ve made 100 calls to different programs. I never actually talk to a human being.”

Kirksey’s son, she reports, has had health issues from the time when he was drinking and bathing in contaminated water. “I noticed his skin began to break out I hives all over his body. It has never went away,” she says.

“It makes me frustrated and angry, to know I gave birth to a beautiful, healthy child. To know he’s sick and helpless, I feel like I failed him.”

Kirksey’s son, who has autism and ADHD, has not been well-served by Flint Community Schools. “They are failing him as a student.  He has issues and no one knows how to help him with his issues.”

For over a decade, the ACLU of Michigan has been challenging Michigan’s sex offender registration law which has barred people with past offenses from living and working in large portions of the state, and has subjected them to ongoing supervision and reporting requirements, in most cases for life, all without any consideration of individual circumstances. In 2012 the ACLU of Michigan, working with the University of Michigan’s clinical law program, challenged the law in federal court on behalf of six registrants—including a man who was never convicted of a sex offense and several men convicted of consensual sex with younger teens, one of whom he has since married. In 2016 the Sixth Circuit issued a groundbreaking decision ruling that the retroactive application of the amendments to those convicted before 2011 violates the United States Constitution’s rule against ex post facto laws. But despite the Sixth Circuit’s ruling, Michigan failed to bring its registry into compliance, leaving tens of thousands of other registrants at risk of prosecution unless they complied with the law’s onerous and unconstitutional requirements. Therefore, in 2018 we filed a class action lawsuit to ensure that all Michigan registrants obtain the benefit of the rulings in the earlier case. In 2020 Judge Robert Cleland ruled in favor of the class. Judge Cleland further ruled that the statute’s exclusion zones and certain reporting requirements are unconstitutionally vague for all registrants, and that strict liability prosecutions under the law are impermissible. In 2021 the Michigan Supreme Court, in a case where we filed friend-of-the-court briefs, also ruled that retroactive application of the statute is unconstitutional. Unable to enforce the old law, the legislature passed a new version which made only minor tweaks. In February 2022 we filed another class action challenging the revised law. (John Does #1-5 v. Snyder; John Does #1-6 v. Snyder; John Does A-H v. Whitmer, People v. Betts; ACLU Attorneys Miriam Aukerman, Dan Korobkin, Monica Andrade, Elaine Lewis, Rohit Rajan, and Dayja Tillman; Cooperating Attorneys Paul Reingold of U-M Law School and Roshna Bala Keen and Imani Franklin of Loevy & Loevy; co-counsel Alyson Oliver and Cameron Bell of Oliver Law Group.)