Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Ramell Levers, a Jamaican citizen and lawful permanent resident since 2015, was convicted in Florida in March 2025 of offenses including cocaine possession, battery on a law enforcement officer, and resisting with violence. Immigration officials detained him on November 19, 2025, and he had not received a bond hearing. An immigration judge ordered his removal to Jamaica on April 9, 2026, based on the controlled-substance conviction. Levers appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
DHS later asked the BIA to remand for a limited mental-competency inquiry, citing a qualified medical provider’s diagnosis that made Levers a member of the Franco-Gonzalez class entitled to specified procedural protections. The magistrate judge noted that the status of the appeal and remand request was unclear because the government’s official case-information website reported that case information was unavailable.
Levers filed his petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 on August 18, 2026. The district judge referred the matter to the magistrate judge, and counsel was subsequently appointed. After the answer, traverse, supplemental traverse, and reply, briefing was complete. The petition presented one claim: prolonged detention violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The government relied on mandatory detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(c)(1)(B), argued that any challenge to that classification belonged in a Joseph hearing, and defended the detention as constitutional.
The Court’s Holding
The court assumed without deciding that § 1226(c) authorized Levers’s detention. Mandatory detention does not foreclose an as-applied due process challenge. Although the Ninth Circuit had not decided whether due process requires a bond hearing for noncitizens detained under that provision, the recommendation drew on other appellate and district decisions recognizing a reasonableness limit on detention’s duration, and joined holdings that unreasonably prolonged mandatory detention without a bond hearing can violate due process.
Applying Mathews v. Eldridge, the court first identified Levers’s protected liberty interest in freedom from detention. His detention had lasted almost a year, exceeding the periods discussed in Demore v. Kim, and could continue during the BIA appeal and possible judicial review. His private interest weighed heavily in his favor because freedom from physical restraint is central to due process, the future detention period was unknown, and the record did not show which party might have caused delays.
The remaining Mathews factors also favored a hearing. Without any bond or custody-redetermination hearing, the risk of erroneous deprivation was high. The court did not decide whether Levers actually posed a danger or flight risk, acknowledging that a neutral adjudicator might find him dangerous. It nevertheless found the government’s interest in detention without a hearing low and the cost of routine immigration detention hearings minimal. The resulting recommendation was a bond hearing, not a determination that Levers should be released.
Key Takeaways
- The findings and recommendations proposed granting the habeas petition, but they were submitted to the assigned district judge and were not themselves a final adoption or judgment.
- The proposed order would require a constitutionally adequate bond hearing before an immigration judge within fourteen days after adoption of the recommendations.
- At that hearing, the government would bear the burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that Levers posed a danger to the community or a flight risk justifying continued detention.
- The court declined to address administrative-exhaustion arguments concerning a Joseph hearing because Levers did not appear to dispute that he was detained under § 1226(c).
- Based on the detention’s length and the mental-health diagnosis described in DHS’s remand motion, the court recommended Franco-Gonzalez protections, including a qualified representative unless an immigration judge had conducted a competency inquiry and found Levers competent to represent himself.
Why It Matters
The recommendation distinguishes mandatory statutory detention from unlimited constitutional detention. Even assuming that Levers had no statutory entitlement to bond, the court concluded that the Constitution required an individualized hearing after nearly a year in custody with no final removal order and an apparently pending administrative appeal. The decision therefore concerns the process required to justify continued custody, rather than the merits of removal or an entitlement to release.
The proposed relief also incorporates specific procedural safeguards: at least seven days’ notice to Levers and, where applicable, his qualified representative and counsel, entry of judgment for Levers and closure of the case, seven days for objections and seven days after service for responses, and a warning that failure to object on time could waive the right to appeal the district court’s order.