ICE re-detained Jorge Gonzalez Ochoa one minute before his court-ordered release, defying a federal judge's order

On December 23, 2025, at 9:59 a.m. — one minute before a federal court order required his release — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers served the Muscatine County Jail with a new arrest warrant and order to detain Jorge Gonzalez Ochoa, a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Colombia. U.S. District Judge Stephen H. Locher of the Southern District of Iowa had ordered ICE to release Gonzalez Ochoa from the jail by 10 a.m. that day, pursuant to a release order issued December 22, 2025, while his criminal case proceeded toward a March 2026 trial date.

Judge Locher later ruled that ICE had no legal basis for the re-arrest at the moment it issued the warrant: no new removal proceeding had been initiated, and ICE had not yet prepared the legally required Notice to Appear — the document triggering a new civil immigration hold — when it served the warrant at 9:59 a.m. Instead, ICE sent the Notice to Appear by regular mail. Locher found this was done deliberately to obscure the sequence of events and make it appear the notice had predated the release order. "ICE knew it should not have issued the arrest warrant and order to detain in the absence of a notice to appear, but sought to 'cover its tracks,'" Locher ruled. "This is unacceptable."

Locher characterized ICE's conduct as constructing a "legal fiction" and found the agency had violated both federal law and his own December 22 order. Gonzalez Ochoa remained in the Muscatine County Jail until January 9, 2026 — seventeen days after the original release order — when he was released following a second order from Locher. The case was one of more than 1,600 in which federal district judges have rejected the Trump administration's mandatory-detention theory for immigration detainees.