On Monday, a federal judge in New York City ordered the immediate release of immigrant rights leader Ravi Ragbir from immigration jail, calling his detention “unnecessarily cruel.” In a decision read aloud from the bench, District Judge Katherine Forrest said Ragbir had “the freedom to say goodbye,” and compared his treatment to that of “regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have long lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home, and work. And sent away. We are not that country; and woe be the day that we become that country under a fiction that laws allow it.”
Ragbir is the executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition. He’s one of a handful of high-profile immigrant rights activists who have been targeted by the Trump administration. For more on his release and what’s next, we speak with Ravi Ragbir; his wife, immigrant rights advocate Amy Gottlieb; and Ravi’s lawyer, Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law.
