Inset: President Donald Trump walks from Marine One after arriving on the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, July 15, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File). Background: Demonstrators gather in south Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 24, 2026, after a man is shot and killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents earlier that morning, according to officials. (Christian Zander/NurPhoto via AP).
A federal judge in New York harshly criticized immigration authorities for “pretextual” and “discriminatory” abuse of authority in the case of an immigrant who came to the country as a child.
The 24-page memorandum and order comes as a particularly voluble example of a “groundswell” in judicial opinion writing. Since the summer of 2025, hundreds of district court judges have — with varying shades of discontent — rejected controversial efforts to reshape how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) classifies immigrants in order to detain them.
In this case, the petitioner, Hesler Asaf Garcia Lanza, convinced U.S. District Judge Gary R. Brown, who was appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term, that his arrest and detention were “unlawful acts.” The government”s behavior after the petitioner won release elicited unalloyed scorn from the court in its Tuesday order.
Garcia Lanza came to the country when he was 9 years old and was granted status under a “Congressionally-enacted program that provides a path to residency and U.S. citizenship,” the court explains.
The petitioner was found to have qualified for the special program because he was abused or abandoned by one or both of his parents, which rendered reunification “impossible,” the order notes.
“As a result, he earned the right to live and work in the United States pending further processes,” the order reads. “Garcia Lanza embraced this opportunity, living lawfully in the United States, graduating from college with honors and working at a career in theatrical lighting design.”
Then came the new indefinite detention policy.
The court offers an unsparing description — and cursory legal analysis — of how the new directive was applied to the petitioner:
[A]s part of ICE’s recent surge in enforcement efforts, in violation of Constitutional safeguards, statutory guarantees and regulatory restrictions, agents arrested him without a warrant. He was handcuffed, shackled and detained in a facility designed to hold charged and convicted criminals. ICE officers targeted Garcia Lanza for arrest simply because he looked like someone else for whom the agents were purportedly searching.
Once officials “discovered their mistake,” they dug in their heels.
“ICE agents nevertheless continued to detain him,” Brown writes. “As bureaucratic cover for the arrest, agents completed a post-arrest administrative warrant and then commenced baseless removal proceedings against him.”
After that, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revoked his protections under the special immigrant juvenile program, including deferred removal status and work authorization, which the judge goes on to explain and describe as “a reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty.”
“Even after this Court set the terms and conditions of petitioner’s release, ICE imposed additional, unsanctioned conditions upon him, and then DHS imposed a hefty fine to offset the cost of his illegal apprehension,” Brown continues. “This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America.”
But that is how things are working now, the judge says, as “the problems documented in this case appear widespread.”
In July 2025, ICE issued the new policy, instructing all agents to deny bond for anyone who entered the country without “inspection,” in a memo that has since opened the floodgates of litigation and invited almost unanimous judicial condemnation over the government’s interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Under the terms of the policy, such immigrants are to be detained “for the duration of their removal proceedings” unless granted parole — a rarer form of release. In real terms, however, the Trump administration has made clear such detentions are intended to be indefinite.
Over the past nine months, in hundreds of district court disputes, judges have considered the interplay and applicability of two distinct INA statutes which outline the government’s detention authority. Many judges have rephrased those statutes using language from a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Samuel Alito.
In short, the government claims ICE has the authority to subject immigrants to mandatory detention under 8 U.S.C. §1225(b), which applies to “aliens seeking entry into the United States.”
Conversely, advocates for immigrants — as well as most judges who have ruled on the matter — have instead turned to 8 U.S.C. §1226(a), which applies to “aliens already present in the United States.”
Brown makes short work of the Trump administration’s arguments about §1225, chiding the government for its “oversized brief” arguing in favor of the statute and noting that it is “an argument rejected by nearly every court that has considered it.” In the end, the court finds the INA statute all but meaningless in Garcia Lanza’s case.
“Yet in this case, the 1225/1226 distinction argument misses the mark entirely: having been awarded [special immigrant juvenile] status, deferred action and work authorization, and with no removal proceeding having been commenced, the petitioner simply was not subject to arrest,” the order reads.
The judge explains that the “legislative mandate” behind the program “has been incorporated into” internal ICE policy. The judge cites the relevant portion of a policy manual which reads: “[T]he beneficiary of an approved [special immigrant juvenile] petition is treated for purposes of the adjustment application as if the beneficiary has been paroled, regardless of the beneficiary’s manner of arrival in the United States.”
The order goes on to fully reject the petitioner’s continued detention on constitutional grounds as well, finding it a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause “which protects non-citizens from arbitrary detention.” The court also piles on, invoking the language of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) — the federal statute governing agency actions — in tandem with the Fifth Amendment analysis.
“Moreover, the ‘process’ undertaken by the Government here, to wit: revoking a defined period of deferred action and work authorization following — and seemingly in an effort to justify — ICE’s patently illegal arrest and detention of petitioner, constitutes arbitrary and capricious Government action incompatible with Constitutional norms,” the order continues.
The judge offers a shot across the bow at the actions of ICE agents:
Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy. Equally, the laws of this nation, including the Constitution, statutory law and regulations, proscribe the illegal arrest and detention of the petitioner as well as the retaliatory termination, without notice, of the privileges associated with his [special immigrant juvenile] status. While the Executive Branch retains the right – as it has done – to set policy regarding immigration matters, it is forbidden from trampling our system of laws – a system which has safeguarded this nation for close to 250 years.
In a footnote, the court muses about a years-old case where Brown chided another immigration agency — U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — for putting up “senseless bureaucratic barriers” to special immigrant status, calling them “dystopian and cruel.” In Garcia Lanza’s case, ICE’s “actions are immeasurably worse,” Brown says.
“In sum, the actions taken against petitioner not only violate statutory and regulatory protections, but were pretextual, discriminatory, arbitrary and capricious so as to run afoul of constitutional protections,” the opinion goes on.
The order grants Garcia Lanza additional relief by revoking any terms of release imposed by ICE, vacates ICE-imposed fines, and directs the agency to return his work authorization card and reinstate his period of deferred removal action.
