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Customs And Border Officials Defied Court Order On Lawful Residents For Hours

Customs And Border Officials Defied Court Order On Lawful Residents For Hours

DULLES, Virginia ― The U.S. government must "permit lawyers access to all legal permanent residents being detained at Dulles International Airport," a federal judge in Virginia ordered late Saturday.

But U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at this airport outside Washington, D.C., defied the judge's order, blocking attorneys from talking to the lawful permanent residents CBP was detaining here.

Border Patrol agents had detained dozens of people who were trying to enter the U.S. from the seven majority-Muslim countries covered by President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration. Trump's measure, which also froze the U.S. refugee resettlement program and banned admission of Syrian refugees indefinitely, requires even legal permanent residents from the affected countries to seek approval for re-entry on a case-by-case basis.

CBP agents never actually complied with the judge's order, because they never let the attorneys into the area where the agency was holding the detainees, eight of the attorneys told HuffPost. But by around 1 a.m. on Sunday, some four hours after the order came down, CBP officials had allowed all but one of the people they were holding to enter the United States.

"It is unusual for an agency to deny a court order ― a court order clearly stating that these people need to be provided counsel," said Claudia Cubas, an attorney with Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition. "We asked several different agency heads to request access to speak to these people and were told 'no.'"

The order, which was issued by Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, also forbade CBP from deporting any lawful permanent residents from Dulles for seven days. It's unclear how many people, if any, CBP is still detaining at the airport. But the agency deported at least one person, a Syrian national, from the airport Saturday.

Sirine Shebaya, a Washington-based civil rights attorney, and Ofelia Calderon, an immigration attorney in Fairfax, Virginia, said CBP was "absolutely" in contempt of Brinkema's order.

Rob Robertson, an attorney representing a Syrian woman married to a visa holder, asked an airport official to admit him to the holding area. But the official said CBP was forbidding the airport from allowing the lawyers access to the detainees, Robertson said. His client had a visa to join her husband, a physician who already has a visa to work at a local hospital.

Also on Saturday night, a federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, stopped parts of Trump's executive order from taking effect across the country, effectively precluding the deportation of refugees immigration authorities had previously approved for admission.