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Tag: plaintiffs

  • Judge hears arguments in a lawsuit to halt ICE arrests without a warrant in DC – WTOP News

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    Some D.C.-area residents shared their stories about being arrested without a warrant by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a hearing Wednesday for a lawsuit aimed at stopping illegal arrests of people perceived to be immigrants.

    Some D.C.-area residents shared their stories about being arrested without a warrant by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a hearing Wednesday for a lawsuit aimed at stopping illegal arrests of people perceived to be immigrants.

    “I was detained by D.C. police and then ICE arrived,” said a plaintiff named Elias through a representative who read his story in U.S. District Court because he is currently in the hospital.

    Elias was arrested by ICE and said he was detained for more than 8 hours. At the time he was detained, he was headed to D.C. for a dialysis appointment, which he has three times a week.

    “I didn’t have my medication with me and I felt very ill. My family was suffering not knowing what will happen to me,” Elias wrote.

    He is one of four plaintiffs represented in Escobar Molina et al. v. the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a lawsuit challenging what they allege are illegal arrests by ICE without warrants or probable cause.

    The plaintiffs are being represented by the ACLU of the District of Columbia, Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, CASA, the National Immigration Project, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and the law firm of Covington, Burling LLP.

    “People are still experiencing these harms day in and day out in the streets of D.C. So we certainly do hope that the court will rule urgently on these issues,” Yulie Landan, staff attorney with the National Immigration Project, said.

    During the hearing, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell listened to arguments in a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case led by CASA to put a stop to the arrests while the case is being considered. They are also asking for class certification of the plaintiffs.

    “We recognize that there are individuals who are impacted by this unlawful policy and practice, far beyond the individual plaintiffs who have bravely put their names and their information before the court,” said Aditi Shah, staff attorney with the ACLU of the District of Columbia.

    Judge Howell asked for more information from both parties in the case with a deadline of Tuesday, Nov. 25.

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    Valerie Bonk

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  • Migrant farmworkers sue seed-corn company over wages and housing

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    Remington Seeds in DeWitt, Iowa. (Photo via Google Earth)

    Seven migrant farmworkers from Texas claim they were recruited to work in Iowa where they were paid illegally low wages and forced to live in substandard housing.

    The workers are suing Remington Seeds, which operates a seed-corn processing facility in DeWitt, and Javier Chapa, a Texas labor broker who runs Chapa Global Contracting. Chapa was allegedly hired by Remington to recruit, house and supervise migrant farmworkers in Iowa, Nebraska and Texas.

    The Texas residents who are suing Chapa and Remington in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa are Homero Reyes, Manuel Ozuna Chavez, Luis Acuna, Antonio de la Rosa, Felipe Arevalo Gonzalez, Juan Antonio Cantu Gonzalez and Juan Lopez Escamilla.

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    Their lawsuit claims the defendants violated the law that requires employers to pay American workers, such as the plaintiffs, the same wages paid to foreigners enrolled in the H-2A program, which allows foreign nationals to fill temporary agricultural jobs.

    The plaintiffs allege that Chapa concealed the fact that he was employing higher-paid foreign nationals in a seed-corn processing plant in Nebraska, and that Chapa also refused to let the plaintiffs take the higher-paying Nebraska jobs.

    The lawsuit claims that for five years, Chapa recruited the plaintiffs to travel from Texas to Iowa where they worked in Remington’s seed-corn processing facility in DeWitt.

    In August, at the beginning of each work season, Chapa allegedly had the workers gather in McAllen, Texas, where they were required to board a bus bound for Iowa. Once in Iowa, the plaintiffs were required to stay for the season at a Quality Inn hotel in Clinton where they were allegedly barred from eating the complimentary breakfast offered to other guests each morning.

    The workers allege they sometimes slept four to a single two-bed room, forcing them to either sleep with each other or on the floor, and that they were required to reimburse Chapa for the cost of their lodging. In October, at the end of each season, the workers returned to Texas on another bus chartered by Chapa.

    The plaintiffs allege that in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, they were each required to reimburse Chapa for the cost of their lodging as well as $450 for bus rides and meals, and that they were barred from using their personal vehicles.

    The reimbursements for transportation, meals and lodging, which the lawsuit characterizes as “kickbacks” paid by the workers to Chapa, effectively reduced their overtime wages to a level below the federally mandated minimum compensation.

    The lawsuit also alleges Chapa failed to comply with the federal law that requires any person who owns or controls housing for migrant agricultural workers to ensure the housing complies with federal safety and health standards.

    The lawsuit alleges violations of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, and seeks damages for lost wages, lodging in “substandard housing at the Quality Inn,” and for discrimination that resulted in them being barred from eating breakfast at the hotel.

    The lawsuit also seeks an injunction requiring the defendants to comply with the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act.

    Chapa declined to comment on the lawsuit when contacted by the Iowa Capital Dispatch. Calls to Remington Seeds were not immediately returned on Thursday.

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  • Apple faces lawsuit over alleged use of pirated books for AI training

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    Two authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of infringing on their copyright by using their books to train its artificial intelligence model without their consent. The plaintiffs, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, claimed that Apple used a dataset of pirated copyrighted books that include their works for AI training. They said in their complaint that Applebot, the company’s scraper, can “reach ‘shadow libraries’” made up of unlicensed copyrighted books, including (on information) their own. The lawsuit is currently seeking class action status, due to the sheer number of books and authors found in shadow libraries.

    The main plaintiffs for the lawsuit are Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, both of whom have multiple books under their names. They said that Apple, one of the biggest companies in the world, did not attempt to pay them for “their contributions to [the] potentially lucrative venture.” Apple has “copied the copyrighted works” of the plaintiffs “to train AI models whose outputs compete with and dilute the market for those very works — works without which Apple Intelligence would have far less commercial value,” they wrote in their filing. “This conduct has deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labor, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means.”

    This is but one of the many lawsuits filed against companies developing generative AI technologies. OpenAI is facing a few, including lawsuits from The New York Times and the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US. Notably, Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action piracy complaint also brought by authors. Similar to this case, the writers also accused the company of taking pirated books from online libraries to train its AI technology. The 500,000 authors involved in the case will reportedly get $3,000 per work.

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    Mariella Moon

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