{"id":540372,"date":"2026-03-14T17:37:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T17:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/540372\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T17:37:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T17:37:19","slug":"lawyers-sharpen-tactics-after-ice-arrests-schoolboy-on-his-way-to-volleyball-training","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/540372\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawyers sharpen tactics after ICE arrests schoolboy on his way to volleyball training"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marcelo Gomes da Silva had just picked up a teammate for volleyball practice on a drizzly Saturday morning last year when he realised he was being followed.<\/p>\n

At first, he thought it was his friends playing a prank. In the small town of Milton, south of Boston, bumping into people happened regularly.<\/p>\n

As he pulled into the driveway to pick up another teammate, three more cars drove up behind the first. Police lights started flashing.<\/p>\n

\"Looking<\/p>\n

Milton is a town south of Boston, Massachusetts. (ABC News: Rachel Clayton)<\/p>\n

A man walked over and knocked on his window.<\/p>\n

“I thought maybe I did something wrong, but I honestly had no clue,” Marcelo says.<\/p>\n

“I feel like that’s one of the reasons I was really, really calm, is because I knew I didn’t do anything wrong. I was driving really slow and really respectfully.”<\/p>\n

But the agents weren’t interested in his driving.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Marcelo was pulled over after picking up his friends for volleyball training. (ABC News: Rachel Clayton)<\/p>\n

They wanted to know where he was from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Marcelo is from Brazil, but had been living in the US since he was six, when he moved with his parents.<\/p>\n

He had a student visa, but it had lapsed.<\/p>\n

Marcelo was now caught up in an immigration crackdown that the Trump administration had long said was targeting violent criminals.<\/p>\n

He says the agents told him, and everyone else in the car, not to touch their phones or they’d be arrested.<\/p>\n

His friends were in tears as Marcelo, then 18 years old, was handcuffed and driven away.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Marcelo’s friends watched as he was handcuffed and taken into ICE custody. (ABC News: Rachel Clayton)<\/p>\n

Locked up<\/p>\n

Almost 70,000 people are being held in ICE detention in the US, according to data analysed by research organisation TRAC.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like Marcelo, about three quarters of them have no criminal convictions.<\/p>\n

In the past, many would have been granted “bond hearings” before immigration judges, then released while their cases were dealt with, immigration lawyers say.<\/p>\n

But the Trump administration has reinterpreted the law to block detainees from routine bond hearings.<\/p>\n

So lawyers have had to find a new strategy to stop immigrants being detained indefinitely while their matters are considered by courts.<\/p>\n

In Marcelo’s case, his lawyer prepared a writ of “habeas corpus”, a legal mechanism enshrined in the US Constitution that forces DHS to justify someone’s detention.<\/p>\n

“Petitioner has no criminal history anywhere in the world,” the writ said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“He is a junior at Milford Public High school. His student visa status has lapsed, but Petitioner is eligible for and intends to apply for asylum.”<\/p>\n

Lawyers are increasingly filing the writs to secure due process for their clients, immigration lawyer Caitlyn Burgess says.<\/p>\n

But they have to move fast.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Caitlyn Burgess said the Trump administration was routinely ignoring court orders to release detainees. (ABC News: Rachel Clayton)<\/p>\n

The writs must be filed in the court district where the detainee is located, and ICE is now routinely moving them interstate after their arrest, she says.<\/p>\n

“So we have to file them as soon as we find out the person is detained,” Ms Burgess says.<\/p>\n

“ICE would detain someone, and we wouldn’t be able to find them for three weeks in the system. [ICE] wouldn’t answer our emails, our calls.”<\/p>\n

In Marcelo’s case, the writ was filed the day after Marcelo’s arrest.<\/p>\n

But his ordeal was still some way from over.<\/p>\n

Prayers in detention<\/p>\n

The ICE agents who arrested Marcelo had driven him to Burlington, about an hour away on the other side of Boston.<\/p>\n

His fingerprints were taken, and he was put in a small cell with about 30 other inmates.<\/p>\n

He says he was denied a phone call to tell his parents what happened or to try and reach a lawyer.<\/p>\n

“I always\u00a0thought I was [going to get out] because I knew I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I prayed a lot and put my faith in God. Nothing was to do with me, God was my guidance.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Marcelo’s school community was coordinating a public pressure campaign demanding his release.<\/p>\n

On the day Marcelo was due to graduate, scores of classmates marched to Milford’s town hall in their graduation robes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Teenagers<\/p>\n

Marcelo’s schoolmates rallied outside the local town hall in their robes on their graduation day. (Reuters: Brian Snyder)<\/p>\n

Teachers and community members joined them with placards calling for his freedom.<\/p>\n

Inside the detention centre, Marcelo says a kind guard pulled him aside.<\/p>\n

“He was like: ‘Hey, you’re like, really famous outside of the detention centre.’ And I was like, what is this guy talking about?”<\/p>\n

DHS responded to the backlash with a tweet<\/a>\u00a0that said Marcelo had not been officers’ “intended” target.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They had wanted to arrest his father, who DHS accused of having a “habit of reckless driving”. They found and detained Marcelo instead.<\/p>\n

Six days after his arrest, Marcelo was released.<\/p>\n

\"Marcelo<\/p>\n

Marcelo still thinks about the people he met inside detention, including one man who “took care of me the entire time”. (ABC News: Rachel Clayton)<\/p>\n

Legal tactics<\/p>\n

Immigration lawyers say habeas corpus writs, like the one used in Marcelo’s case, have become a valuable weapon in a broader fight to force the government to follow due process.<\/p>\n

Caitlyn Burgess, a senior lawyer with MacMurray & Associates in Boston, rarely used them in the past. Now she files four to five a day.<\/p>\n

But the government is not always following court orders to release detained migrants.<\/p>\n

“There’s no accountability with this administration,” Ms Burgess told the ABC.<\/p>\n

“Due process is being completely eroded.”<\/p>\n

A Reuters investigation<\/a>\u00a0last month found US judges had ruled more than 4,400 times since October that ICE had detained immigrants unlawfully.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Marcelo had built a life in the US after arriving as a child. (ABC News: Rachel Clayton)<\/p>\n

Some were scathing in their findings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In January, Minnesota’s chief federal judge said his “court has had to threaten contempt \u2014 again and again and again \u2014 to force the United States government to comply with court orders”.<\/p>\n

The same month, a Florida judge said the government appeared to “deliberately mislead the court” over the detention of a Venezuelan teenager who had been in the US since childhood.<\/p>\n

The student had a pending asylum claim, permission to work in the US and no criminal record.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The judge ruled immigration officials had relied on the wrong law to detain him for days without charges or a hearing.<\/p>\n

“In this country, we don’t enforce the law by breaking the law,” Judge Roy Dalton Jr wrote.<\/p>\n

DHS did not respond to the ABC’s questions.<\/p>\n

But the department has argued that the government is enforcing the law “as it was actually written” rather than how it was enforced in the past.<\/p>\n

And government lawyers have told courts that detention is necessary to prevent detainees from fleeing. They describe it as an administrative measure \u2014 not a form of punishment.<\/p>\n

It was “no surprise that more habeas petitions are being filed by illegal aliens”, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told Politico<\/a>\u00a0recently. “Especially after many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

A parting gift<\/p>\n

Marcelo still thinks about the people he met in detention.<\/p>\n

“They were all really nice people,” he says.<\/p>\n

Many were dressed in work clothes and boots.<\/p>\n

“They really just took a bunch of workers and brought them to the detention centre.”<\/p>\n

He says one man “just took care of me the entire time”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“He treated me like I was his kid.”<\/p>\n

Right before the two were separated into different cells, the man ripped a piece of tin foil from the emergency blankets the detainees were given to stay warm at night.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A fellow detainee gifted Marcelo a bracelet made from part of a foil blanket. (ABC News: Rachel Clayton)<\/p>\n

He folded it carefully into a bracelet and wrapped it around Marcelo’s wrist.<\/p>\n

“He said: ‘Here take this, take care of it, because I know that I’m going to go to a different cell, I might not see you again. This is just for you to remember me.'”<\/p>\n

Marcelo doesn’t know what happened to him, or the other people he met in detention.<\/p>\n

But he says he is now working with members of Congress to help craft a law he hopes will protect other migrants from being swept up without due process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s not something I wanted to happen,” he said. “But I see beauty in everything because I believe in God.”<\/p>\n

He was brought to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address last month\u00a0as a guest of Democratic congressman Seth Moulton.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But he left for his own safety before the speech finished after DHS posted that night on X that Marcelo was “an illegal alien who has no right to be in our nation”.<\/p>\n

Marcelo’s application for asylum is pending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marcelo Gomes da Silva had just picked up a teammate for volleyball practice on a drizzly Saturday morning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[228041,70,43,7963,81691,267807,44,2425,41,39,42,40,267808],"class_list":["post-540372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-border-patrol","tag-federal-court","tag-headlines","tag-ice","tag-immigration-enforcement","tag-marcelo-gomes-da-silva","tag-news","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-us-immigration-detention"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}