For the past month, the Stanford Law School Immigrants’ Rights Clinic has been working closely with the American Civil Liberties Union to secure the release of four immigrants in southern California who have been detained for periods as long as four years without a hearing.

The group filed a motion Oct. 10 asking U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter to grant the detainees immediate hearings or release them under conditions of supervision, but Hatter dismissed the case last Tuesday on the grounds that each plaintiff’s defense should be brought forth separately.

Despite this setback, the ACLU and Stanford will push ahead with their challenge to the policy. The problem with the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency’s policy, they argue, is that individuals are routinely detained for extended periods of time regardless of probable deportment in the future.

“People who are detained should get a hearing to determine whether their detention is justified,” said Jayashri Srikantiah, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic and an associate professor at the Law School. “This is not just limited to California. It is a problem nationwide with the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration policies.”

The four detainees include Raymond Soeoth, a 38-year-old Chinese immigrant from Indonesia, John Rasheed, a 37-year-old Nigerian, Amadou Diouf, a 31-year-old Senegalese man, and Victor Martinez, an Ecuadorian immigrant.

All four of the detainees have been kept for more than 18 months. Martinez, who has been detained for nearly four years, has a nine-year-old daughter who is an American citizen.

“A lot of these are people who, for all intents and purposes, have lived in the United States their entire life,” said Cecilia Wang, a senior staff counsel for the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project. “You wouldn’t guess that they’re not American. They’re all working and contributing to their communities.”

Prior to his detainment, Soeoth worked as a pastor in his community and owned a small cell phone business.

“This man has no criminal convictions, and would be faced with persecution if he returned to his home country,” Wang said.

Srikantiah argued that the current detention process makes it almost impossible for detainees to seek legal help or advice.

“They don’t have access to lawyers, or finances or even their families,” Srikantiah said. “They are prevented from seeking what they need to get out of detention as a result of being in detention. This is why we need a uniform policy governing the process, so that each person is treated the same.”

The recent motion came after Stanford and the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit, calling for the release of six detainees. The motion led to the release of two of the six plaintiffs, but the reasoning behind the detainment of the other four remains unclear.

“There really is no consistent procedure,” Srikantiah said. “One of the challenges in this issue is that it appears to have no rhyme or reason in terms of who is released and who’s not.”

In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled in Zadvydas v. Davis that immigrants awaiting deportation could not be held in detention longer than six months “unless there is a realistic chance that an immigrant will be removed.” While this case pertained only to those detainees under a final order, Srikantiah said their eventual goal is to have all detainees included in this stipulation.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, said the ruling does not apply to immigrants who are fighting their deportation. The agency is required by law to detain all immigrants convicted of certain felonies, or those considered to be flight risks or threats to public safety or national security, Kice said.

But Srikantiah disagreed.

“The difference is that here we are talking about people within the deportation proceedings,” Srikantiah said. “The Court said that detention past six months was problematic and we are saying that this context should apply to detainees even before they are deported, based on the Ninth Circuit law.”