What should happen when an ICE arrests disrupts a criminal case?

What the Supreme Judicial Court rules will have sweeping consequences for how the Massachusetts criminal justice system interacts with the Trump administration’s federal immigration apparatus.

Official response and confirmed impact

A ruling, however, won’t come for a few months.

To be sure, ICE is not legally required to follow orders issued by state courts, as Massachusetts judges have no jurisdiction over the agency.

“Normally, state actors don’t have the ability to directly affect federal immigration enforcement,” said David Rassoul Rangaviz, an attorney for a man who was detained while there was an open criminal case against him in Massachusetts.

The cases before the SJC also raise questions of justice for victims, even those affected by less-serious crimes.

The SJC hearings scheduled for Monday morning come two weeks after an immigration sweep that played out in public on the South Coast, a reminder that the deportation machine President Trump crafted in the first months of his second term continues to churn.

Incident under investigation

But state actions in criminal cases can directly impact immigration proceedings; if charges go away, so can the federal government’s reason for holding someone without bond.

“The answer cannot be that most District Court cases brought against defendants vulnerable to deportation will become functionally unprosecutable,” Bristol Assistant District Attorney Shoshana Stern wrote in a filing to the high court.