The case began with a sting operation run by the Danbury, Conn., Police Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. On Sept. 19, 2006, an undercover police officer posed as a contractor and offered work to day laborers gathered at a roadside. He then drove them to a spot where the federal agents waited; from there, they were sent to deportation facilities.
It ended in March 2011, when a judge signed off on a civil rights settlement requiring the city and federal governments to pay $650,000 to eight day laborers. It was one of the first rulings concerning police dealings with suspected undocumented immigrants, and the largest financial settlement yet reached in an illegal profiling case, according to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Joel Cohen, who collaborated on the case with Yale Law School professor Michael Wishnie and Yale’s Jerome Frank Legal Clinic.
