Left: U.S. President Donald Trump addresses a joint press conference with Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the East Room at the White House on Thursday, February 27, 2025, in Washington (Carl Court/Pool Photo via AP). Right: U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo (Robert H. Jackson Center/YouTube).
The Trump administration‘s green light to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to detain and hold a man from West Africa who has lived in the United States for more than three decades violated the man’s due process rights and ICE’s own regulations, according to a federal judge who also called the move “downright frightening.”
In an order issued Friday — just days before Donald Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he wasn’t sure if noncitizens in the U.S. were entitled to due process — U.S. District Judge Lawrence J. Vilardo demanded the release of Sering Ceesay, a 63-year-old native of Gambia who lives in New York. According to court documents, Ceesay suffers from chronic medical issues, and his battle to stay in the U.S. has been going on for decades: he was ordered in September 1997 to voluntarily leave the country by November of that year. He didn’t, but he did appear for regular check-ins in the years since. When he failed to produce a passport at his scheduled meeting in February, an ICE agent allegedly became “enraged” and ordered him to be detained, Vilardo said in the order.
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Ceesay, who is currently being represented by the organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, filed a petition of habeas corpus over his detention. As Vilardo noted, Ceesay wasn’t challenging ICE’s “substantive authority” to detain him, but rather “the fact that he is being held without the proper procedures.”
The judge, a Barack Obama appointee, agreed, and took the government to task for its argument that Ceesay would have been detained even if it had provided him with due process.
“[T]he government’s suggestion — that a complaint about failing to follow proper process is nonjusticiable so long as the government says that the result would have been the same had it followed the required procedure — is downright frightening,” the judge wrote in Friday’s order. “Procedure is not mere puffery, a gesture that is irrelevant so long as the result is correct. The Constitution safeguards not just substantive rights under the law but due process as well. That process is at the core of what our Constitution guarantees.”
“In the United States, even a scoundrel has the right to remain free until due process has proven him a scoundrel,” Vilardo added.
Ceesay’s lawyers say he was never given an opportunity to prepare for his deportation and departure after being detained.
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Vilardo concluded that it’s ultimately impossible for the U.S. to pride itself for being a “nation of laws” when we are not willing to provide due process and to “extend that most fundamental right to all,” including immigrants.
“Everyone — citizen and noncitizen, the innocent and the guilty — is entitled to that sacred right,” Vilardo said. “Ceesay did not get that here. And for that reason … because ICE did not follow its own regulations in deciding to re-detain Ceesay, his due process rights were violated, and he is entitled to release. And even if that were not so, he still would be released because he was not afforded even the minimal due process that protects everyone — citizens and noncitizens — in the United States.”
According to the federal case docket, Ceesay notified the court on Saturday that he had been released from custody. Vilardo, however, declined Ceesay’s request to stay his removal beyond noon Tuesday, at which point ICE may be allowed to take him into custody again.
