NEPTUNE NEWS™
Motel 6 has reached a tentative agreement in a lawsuit that claims it discriminated against some of its Latino guests and violated their privacy, a civil rights group says.
The suit says two Phoenix locations of the hotel chain gave details of at least seven guests' whereabouts and handed other personal information over to federal immigration agents before the guests got arrested.
The claim was filed by a Latino civil rights group, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
The suit also alleges Motel 6 has a practice of giving guests' check-in information to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a warrant or a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is going on. Turning over their information to ICE is a violation of their privacy, the suit says.
Motel 6 has agreed to settle the suit, but it's subject to a federal judge's approval.
MALDEF officials say they've reached a settlement, but they're not releasing details yet. CNN has reached out to Motel 6 officials for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
What the plaintiffs say happened
Court documents describe one account of what allegedly took place at a Phoenix Motel 6.
Last June, a woman and her four kids checked in at the Black Canyon Motel 6 to get out of the heat because their apartment didn't have air conditioning, the lawsuit says.
When she registered, she showed a hotel employee her Mexican consular ID. The worker photocopied it.
Early the next morning, three ICE agents banged on the woman's hotel room door. They called themselves police, the document says.
When the woman opened the door, the agents interrogated her in front of her kids. They asked her to confirm her identity and threatened to separate her from her children, so she cooperated.
Before they left, the agents gave the woman a letter telling her to go to an ICE office. When she got there, she was fingerprinted and interrogated again by an ICE agent.
The woman asked the agent if a Motel 6 employee had given them her information. The agent laughed and said her name just happened to pop up in the system. After that, the suit says, they arrested her without a warrant.
The court documents list several similar stories that claim the motel violated the rights of its Latino customers. Of eight Latino guests who stayed at the Phoenix-area motels, they say seven were arrested. At least one of the individuals arrested was subsequently deported, the suit says.
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