The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau that covers Virginia and Washington, D.C., has released three immigrants whose detention had become a point of conflict between humanitarian groups and immigration officials.

The three men — two from El Salvador and one from Honduras — had won humanitarian protections from an immigration judge in March, who had ruled that deporting them back to their home countries would put them at risk of torture or death.

Internal memos from immigration officials say that when those protections are won, detainees should be released from detention centers where they are held by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. But the Washington Field Office of that agency kept the three men for months after, leading the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia to file a lawsuit on their behalf.

Two weeks later, the men were released. It’s not clear where they were living at the time of their arrest, but they were detained in jails in Farmville and Caroline County, which contract with ICE.

“Holding our clients in detention for no good reason violated the Constitution, immigration law, and ICE’s own policy. We’re pleased that ICE recognized it had no right to continue to hold our clients, but it’s concerning that the ICE Washington Field Office has given no indication that it will rectify what has become a pattern of holding non-citizens for months after they won their cases,” said Sophia Gregg, a lawyer with the ACLU of Virginia.

Gregg said that it shouldn’t take a lawsuit for the agency to comply with its own policies.

“We’ll continue to bring habeas petitions against the ICE Washington Field Office for its ongoing violations until the agency honors immigrants’ constitutional rights and releases them to their families and communities,” Gregg said.

Representatives for ICE’s Washington Field Office said the agency doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.

ACLU of Va. was joined in the lawsuit by two other human rights organizations, the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and the National Immigration Project.

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