Immigration

ICE is re-arresting immigrants right after courts order them freed, report finds

Washington • November 2, 2026 • By Press Pass USA

Editorial illustration: people seen from behind walking toward a federal courthouse entrance on an autumn morning, with officers standing near the doorway

Editorial illustration — Press Pass USA

Immigrants who win their freedom in federal court are increasingly being detained again almost immediately, The Guardian reported Monday, identifying at least 20 such cases across the country in the past year — a pattern that is drawing rebukes from judges in several states.

The cases center on habeas corpus petitions, the legal tool that lets a person ask a federal judge to rule on whether the government has a lawful basis to keep them in detention while their immigration case moves forward. According to research by ProPublica cited in the report, immigrants have filed more than 91,000 such petitions, with more filed since January 25 than during the previous three presidential administrations combined.

Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, told The Guardian there has been a sharp rise in people freed on habeas petitions who are then detained again very quickly, often in defiance of the court's order.

The sharpest examples come from Minnesota. Seven immigrants were re-detained before they even got out of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building outside Minneapolis, Minnesota Public Radio reported. In one case, Milton Saltos Velasquez, a 45-year-old from Ecuador, was told around noon on October 19 that he was being released under a judge's order, then was handcuffed, processed again and driven toward a county jail before a radio message turned the convoy around, MPR reported. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan later found that immigration authorities had failed to release him and ordered his immediate release, warning of possible sanctions.

In Louisiana, a federal judge held a senior federal immigration official in contempt and ordered the release of Ibrahim Mohammed after he had been re-arrested three times by ICE, The Guardian reported. Judges in Pennsylvania and Minnesota have also held immigration authorities in contempt or threatened to do so, according to the report.

One of the cases highlighted by The Guardian involves Akram Mahmoud Omar, a 77-year-old Palestinian man who suffered a heart attack while detained at Camp 57, the ICE facility inside Louisiana's Angola prison, and was arrested again within 10 days of his release on a habeas petition, as first reported by The Intercept.

In October, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Colorado refused the government's attempt to dismiss a habeas petition on the theory that it could simply re-detain the petitioner, pointing to what it called the government's demonstrated pattern of re-detaining people granted habeas relief.

Attorneys link some of the re-detentions to the administration's push to deport people to third countries — nations where they hold no citizenship and often have no ties — rather than to their home countries. People with withholding-of-removal orders cannot be sent to the countries named in those orders, but they can be removed to third countries, a long-standing legal position that attorneys say was not previously enforced this way. The Guardian reported that more than 25,000 non-citizens have been deported to countries other than their own.

The Department of Homeland Security has rejected the idea that re-arrests evade judges, arguing that a release order does not shield a person from immigration enforcement indefinitely. Attorneys, meanwhile, are asking judges to write release orders that are harder to undo — for example, by requiring several days' notice before any new removal attempt — and say the fear of immediate re-detention is traumatizing clients and families even when they win in court.

Courts are also struggling to keep up: thousands of habeas cases are taking months to resolve, particularly in Louisiana and Texas, where many detention centers are located, according to an analysis by Bolts, the Lens and the Texas Tribune cited in the report.

Sources: The Guardian (Nov. 2, 2026, full article verified via live read); MPR News (Oct. 28, 2026, Minnesota Whipple Building re-arrests, as corroborated in subsequent reporting); ProPublica habeas-petition research, as cited by The Guardian; The Intercept (Omar case, as cited by The Guardian).