Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Marvin Bernabe Cruz-Ramirez, a citizen of Guatemala, entered the United States with his father in 2019, when he was 17 years old. According to the order, immigration officers released him and his father into the country on conditional parole issued under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a). He then lived in the United States continuously, applied for asylum, and worked in the construction industry in Florida.
On June 30, 2026, ICE officers detained him at his workplace in Miami, and he was transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in the Southern District of California, where the order states he remained. He filed an amended petition for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, arguing that his detention violated the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause and the prohibition on warrantless arrests in 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a)(2).
Respondents, the warden and other officials, acknowledged that Petitioner is detained under § 1226(a). They did not oppose the petition and deferred to the court on the appropriate relief. The order's factual account is drawn from the petition and the government's response.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Ruth Bermudez Montenegro granted the amended petition. The order contains little extended merits analysis. The court granted the petition in light of Respondents' non-opposition and its many earlier orders granting similar petitions, citing three of them. The order does not say whether the Fifth Amendment claim or the warrantless-arrest claim supplied the ground for relief, and it does not address the asylum application or any removal proceedings.
The court also found that immediate release, rather than a bond hearing, was the appropriate remedy. Relying on decisions from the Western District of Washington and the Northern District of California, it reasoned that a post-detention bond hearing cannot adequately guard against an erroneous deprivation of liberty because it comes after the fact, and that a person released at such a hearing has already suffered the harm of potentially erroneous detention.
The order requires three things. First, Respondents must immediately release Petitioner, subject to the conditions of his preexisting parole. Second, before any re-detention, Petitioner must receive a hearing before an immigration judge to determine whether detention is warranted; at that hearing the noncitizen bears the burden of establishing by a preponderance of the evidence that he is not a danger to the community or a flight risk, a standard for which the court cited Rodriguez Diaz v. Garland. Third, if the immigration judge finds that bond is appropriate, the judge must consider alternative conditions of release and the noncitizen's ability to pay, a requirement the court tied to Hernandez v. Sessions.
Key Takeaways
- The court granted the petition because Respondents did not oppose it and because the court had granted many similar petitions, not because of a detailed new analysis of the statutory or constitutional claims.
- The remedy is immediate release subject to Petitioner's preexisting parole conditions, and the court expressly preferred release to a bond hearing because a hearing after detention comes too late to prevent the harm.
- Any future re-detention must be preceded by an immigration judge hearing, but at that hearing the noncitizen, not the government, bears the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that he is neither a danger nor a flight risk.
- If an immigration judge finds bond appropriate, the judge must consider alternative conditions of release and the person's ability to pay.
- The order is an unpublished district court ruling that binds only these parties, and it leaves open how the court would resolve the claims in a contested case.
Why It Matters
This is an unpublished order from a single district judge, so it has no precedential force beyond the parties. Its main value is as an example of how the court handles unopposed habeas petitions by people detained under § 1226(a) after earlier release on parole, with the order pointing to three of its own earlier decisions.
The order pairs a strong remedy, immediate release instead of a bond hearing, with a notable allocation of the burden: at any hearing held before re-detention, the noncitizen must carry the burden, though the immigration judge must weigh alternatives to detention and ability to pay. Because the government did not contest the petition, the order does not test the merits of the underlying due process or § 1357(a)(2) theories, and those questions remain open for contested cases.