Reyes v. Danbury is the shorthand often used for a federal civil rights lawsuit, formally captioned Barrera v. Boughton, brought by a group of Latino day laborers who were arrested in a 2006 Danbury, Connecticut police sting and turned over to federal immigration agents. The case settled in early 2011 for $650,000, split between the City of Danbury and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and became a widely cited test of whether local police can seize people for suspected immigration violations without probable cause of a crime. A separate immigration appeal by one of the men, Reyes v. Lynch, reached the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and produced a very different result.
The 2006 Sting in Kennedy Park
On September 19, 2006, a Danbury police officer working undercover posed as a building contractor and drove an unmarked van to Kennedy Park, a downtown gathering spot where day laborers waited for work. He offered the men $11 an hour to demolish a fence. Eleven Latino men accepted and climbed in.
The van did not go to a job site. It went to a location where other Danbury officers and federal ICE agents were waiting. All eleven men were arrested and transferred to federal custody for removal proceedings. They became known as the Danbury 11.
The operation unfolded during a period of intense local tension over immigration. Mayor Mark Boughton had taken a combative public stance on the issue and backed the police department’s actions. The city framed the sting as a response to community complaints. Civil rights advocates saw a local police force conducting federal immigration enforcement by targeting Latino residents. Community members reached the Yale Law School Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, which took on the men’s representation.
The Civil Rights Lawsuit
In September 2007, the Yale clinic filed suit in federal court against the City of Danbury, Mayor Boughton, individual police officers, and several federal agents. The case was brought under 42 U.S.C. ยง 1983, the statute that lets people sue state and local officials for constitutional violations committed under color of law. Suing the city itself is a higher bar: a municipality can be held liable only when the violation flows from an official policy or established custom, not from a one-off act by an employee. The plaintiffs argued the sting was exactly that kind of official action, directed by the mayor and police leadership as part of a broader campaign targeting Danbury’s Latino and immigrant communities.
Fourth Amendment: Arrest Without Probable Cause
The central claim was that the arrests violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable seizures. Accepting an offer of work is not a crime. The plaintiffs argued police had no probable cause to believe any criminal activity had occurred at the moment the men were detained.
Fourteenth Amendment: Equal Protection
The complaint alleged a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, contending the men were singled out because of their race, ethnicity, and perceived national origin. According to the filings, Danbury police targeted the Latino men gathered at Kennedy Park for what the complaint called “special harassment” as part of a wider pattern of discriminatory enforcement.
First Amendment: Retaliation for Public Gathering
The lawsuit also raised a First Amendment claim, arguing that the arrests were partly retaliation for the men’s exercise of protected rights, namely gathering and communicating in a public park. The day laborers’ visible presence at Kennedy Park had become a political flashpoint, and the plaintiffs alleged the city used the sting to punish them for exercising freedoms of speech and association.
Federal Preemption
The complaint further argued that Danbury police had overstepped their authority by running what was, in substance, a federal immigration operation. Civil immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, and the plaintiffs contended local officers had no legal basis to arrest people for suspected immigration violations. That argument fed into a national debate over local police involvement in immigration enforcement.
The Immigration Status Ruling
One pretrial ruling shaped the rest of the case. A federal judge blocked the city’s attempt to force the plaintiffs to disclose their immigration status during the civil rights litigation. Compelled disclosure could have exposed the men to further immigration consequences and would have deterred other immigrants from bringing civil rights claims. The ruling also kept the focus where the plaintiffs wanted it: on whether the seizure at the moment of arrest was constitutional. Under that framing, whether the men were later found to be undocumented was legally beside the point. Accepting a job in a public park does not give police grounds to arrest anyone, regardless of immigration status.
The $650,000 Settlement
In early 2011, the case resolved through settlement. The City of Danbury agreed to pay $400,000, and ICE agreed to pay $250,000, for a combined $650,000 distributed among the eight remaining plaintiffs. After roughly $85,000 in litigation costs accumulated since 2007, the balance went to the men. Plaintiffs’ counsel described it at the time as the largest civil rights settlement ever obtained by day laborers.
The settlement was purely monetary. Mayor Boughton stated publicly that the agreement would not produce any policy changes in his city, and a city official confirmed that no policy or procedural changes at the local level were required by the settlement terms. Danbury did not admit to violating anyone’s rights. There were no mandated police training programs, no new complaint procedures, and no formal policy barring officers from asking about immigration status. Critics argued that a cash payment without structural reform left the underlying practices untouched.
The Immigration Proceedings and Reyes v. Lynch
While the civil rights case moved through federal court, the Danbury 11 faced a parallel fight in immigration court, and that track produced a very different outcome. The men’s attorneys argued that evidence obtained through the unconstitutional arrests should be suppressed in removal proceedings. The Board of Immigration Appeals rejected the argument, ruling that “the solicitation of day labor has a strong correlation to undocumented presence” and that the arresting officers had “reasonable suspicion based on articulable facts to believe that an immigration violation had occurred.” That reasoning was hard to square with the civil rights case’s central claim that the arrests lacked probable cause, but immigration proceedings apply different legal standards than criminal or civil rights cases.
One of the men, identified as Reyes, took a further appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the case styled Reyes v. Lynch. The appeal turned on whether the Fourth Amendment violations were sufficiently “egregious” to warrant suppression of evidence in removal proceedings. The Second Circuit applied a flexible, case-by-case standard that weighed factors such as whether the seizure lacked any plausible legal grounds or rested on grossly improper considerations like race or ethnicity. The immigration appeals ultimately did not halt the deportation proceedings. The men won compensation for the violation of their civil rights, but the same violation was not enough to prevent removal.
Why the Case Still Matters
The Danbury 11 litigation established, at least through the leverage of a large settlement, that local police cannot round up people who look like they might be undocumented and hand them to ICE without constitutional consequences. The Fourth Amendment applies to everyone physically present in the United States, and arresting a person for accepting a job in a public park requires more than a hunch about immigration status. The size of the payout sent a financial signal to other municipalities weighing similar operations.
The case also exposed a hard tension between two legal systems. The civil rights process vindicated the men’s constitutional rights and produced meaningful compensation. The immigration process, applying its own standards, treated the same facts differently and continued toward removal. For immigrants deciding whether to challenge police misconduct, the outcome shows both the reach and the limits of constitutional litigation. Danbury became, as one account put it, “a flash point in a national debate over how suburban towns deal with day laborers and whether local authorities should engage in immigration enforcement,” and that debate has continued to shape policy well after the checks cleared.