ICE detained Werner Kunkel under a removal order tied to his vacated murder conviction, hours after a judge ordered his release

On August 13, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took Werner Kunkel into federal custody at the Devils Lake, North Dakota jail, less than 24 hours after North Dakota District Judge Ted Sandberg had ordered him released on a $25,000 personal-recognizance bond with electronic monitoring. Kunkel, 65, had spent more than 30 years in state prison for the 1995 killing of Gilbert Fassett before District Judge Daniel Narum vacated the conviction in February 2026, finding that prosecutors had withheld evidence that could have proved his innocence.

ICE's detainer traces to a 1996 removal order issued on the same murder conviction North Dakota courts have since vacated. Kunkel's legal team met this same conflict once already, in March 2026, when ICE arrived at the state prison with the detainer while Kunkel's post-conviction case was pending; North Dakota officials kept him in state custody pending the state's appeal of the vacatur rather than release him to ICE. That appeal was still pending in August when Sandberg granted release on bond. Jail staff at the Devils Lake facility had Kunkel prepared for release when ICE notified them of the outstanding detainer and took him into custody instead, moving him to the Grand Forks County Jail.

Dane DeKrey, an attorney representing Kunkel, said on the record that ICE could have acted on the decades-old detainer at any point during Kunkel's 30 years of incarceration but moved only once a judge set conditions for his release to his elderly, terminally ill mother in Devils Lake, calling the timing "not a coincidence." No bond hearing in Kunkel's immigration case, to be held in St. Paul, had been scheduled as of this recording.

The archive records this because the detainer and removal order holding Kunkel in federal custody are predicated on a criminal conviction a state court has already found unsound, and his continued confinement rests on that same predicate without a hearing addressing the changed circumstances.