Zepeda Rivas v. Jennings
- Laurel Beeler
- 3:20-cv-02731
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 2
In Zepeda Rivas v. Jennings, Judge Chhabria scheduled a hearing, expressed tentative views favoring provisional class certification, and ordered defendants to provide detainee information.
Immigration detainees at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility and the Yuba County Jail, as well as the defendants, facility staff, and potentially the general public.
What happened
In Zepeda Rivas v. Jennings, the court scheduled a public hearing for April 28, 2020, on the plaintiffs’ requests for provisional class certification, emergency relief, and a stay.
The court tentatively said that a class covering immigration detainees at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility and Yuba County Jail should be provisionally certified and divided into facility-based subclasses. It also tentatively concluded that the plaintiffs had made a strong case that conditions created an unreasonable risk of infection and that ICE was violating the proposed class’s due-process rights.
Judge Vince Chhabria ordered the defendants to submit a list of detainees at each facility by 5:00 p.m. on April 28, including each person’s name, age, qualifying health conditions, criminal convictions, and criminal charges. The order did not finally decide the motions or the form of any remedy.
The detailed version
- Zepeda Rivas v. Jennings · No. 3:20-cv-02731
- Laurel Beeler
- Apr. 27, 2020
Background
The order concerns three pending requests: provisional class certification, emergency relief, and a stay. The court scheduled a public hearing on those requests for April 28, 2020, by Zoom Webinar.
Court’s Tentative Views
The court stated that it was tentatively of the view that a class consisting of all immigration detainees at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility and the Yuba County Jail should be provisionally certified. It also indicated that the class should likely be divided into subclasses by facility and asked the parties to consider whether additional subdivisions were appropriate, including a possible division based on whether detainees faced heightened COVID-19 risks under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
The court further stated that the plaintiffs appeared to have made a strong case that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was systematically violating the due-process rights of the proposed class of civil detainees because conditions at the facilities created an unreasonable risk of infection. The court said that a system-wide remedy appeared appropriate and in the public interest because it could reduce risks to detainees, facility staff, and the general public.
Order
The court identified the appropriate system-wide remedy as the main issue for the hearing. To assist in evaluating possible remedies, it ordered the defendants to submit a list of all immigration detainees at each facility, grouped as discussed in the order. For each detainee, the list had to identify the person’s name, age, any health condition creating heightened COVID-19 risk under the cited guidelines, crimes of conviction, and crimes charged. The list was due to the court by 5:00 p.m. on April 28. The order left for the hearing whether, and in what form, the information should be disclosed to plaintiffs’ counsel.
This was an order scheduling a hearing and directing the submission of information. The court’s statements about class certification, due-process violations, and a remedy were expressly tentative; the order did not state that the motions were granted or denied.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.