Reynel Bautista-Anzola, Angel Marquez-Perez and Francisco Delgado-Garcia entered the courtroom shackled on Feb. 9 and, walking in a line, were ushered in by federal officers to wait for their cases to be heard.<\/p>\n
The hearing in federal court in Orlando was to determine whether the three men, all migrants who\u2019d been in ICE custody for weeks, should remain detained. U.S. Senior District Judge Gregory Presnell took less than an hour to order the men\u2019s release, saying the delay in providing them bond hearings in immigration court left them wrongly languishing in detention.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn our general jurisprudence, a reasonable time for a bond hearing would be 72 hours, not 17 days,\u201d Presnell said of Delgado-Garcia\u2019s case.<\/p>\n
But the future for the three men \u2014 one from Colombia, two from Venezuela, none with a criminal record \u2014 is unclear, just as it is for thousands of other immigrants released after being swept up as part of the Trump administration\u2019s mass deportation campaign.<\/p>\n
Recent weeks have seen what amounts to a mass rejection by federal judges across the country of a relatively new practice by the Trump administration \u2014 indefinitely detaining immigrant non-citizens who are in the country lawfully and have committed no crime. That practice is at sharp odds with the administration\u2019s rhetoric early in Trump\u2019s second term, where officials insisted they were targeting only \u201cthe worst of the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n
But many Americans have gone along with the widening dragnet and some judges have too, with the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana two weeks ago becoming the highest court so far to uphold the indefinite detentions. The 2-to-1 decision, experts say, re-interprets a federal provision that historically had applied only to people stopped at the border and makes it applicable to any undocumented immigrant, most of whom previously were considered to have due-process rights to challenge such detentions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re going to take this interpretation \u2026 that it applies to individuals who are already in the United States, then what you\u2019ve done is essentially made an endless, ever-present border,\u201d said Fritz Scheller, a Central Florida attorney specializing in federal cases who recently began representing migrants petitioning for release.<\/p>\n
The Fifth Circuit\u2019s ruling does not apply to detainees held in Florida, and hundreds of federal judges, including several in Orlando, have rejected the government\u2019s viewpoint.<\/p>\n
But a similar question under consideration in the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit could have massive implications for detainees in Florida and elsewhere in the Southeast \u2014 and perhaps set up a legal battle at the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
Since January 2025, thousands of migrants, among them nearly 600 in the Middle District of Florida \u2014 which covers Central Florida \u2014 have filed so-called habeas corpus petitions to force the government to justify their prolonged detention, according to a case tracker by ProPublica.<\/p>\n
Thousands, including at least 17 people in Orlando, have since secured their release.<\/p>\n
With ICE reporting 68,000 detainees in its custody, a record-breaking figure, the deluge of petitions has clogged federal court dockets.<\/p>\n
The intensifying clashes between federal judges and the Trump-backed U.S. attorneys stem from the interpretation of two different statutes, one focused on migrants stopped at the border or a port of entry and the other on migrants already living in the country, which says people already living in the country may be eligible for a bond hearing to consider their release. That latter statute is what many federal judges have cited when releasing detainees who\u2019ve been held indefinitely without such a hearing.<\/p>\n
In the Fifth Circuit case, however, the majority ruled that the 1996 law passed by Congress did not mean migrants already living here were entitled to bond hearings.<\/p>\n
The government\u2019s position, ultimately, is that any migrant, even those who have petitioned for asylum and have lived in the U.S. for years without issue, is subject to indefinite detention, said American Immigration Council senior litigation attorney Suchi Mathur.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what we would call a legal fiction, and in these cases, the majority of federal judges have said that doesn\u2019t make sense,\u201d Mathur said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a plain text reading of the statute.\u201d<\/p>\n
Assistant U.S. attorneys in Orlando seemingly abandoned the argument for indefinite detention after facing admonitions in court in recent weeks. In Bautista-Anzola\u2019s case, U.S. Attorney Gregory Kehoe conceded the right to a bond hearing \u2014 but then announced on a Sunday it would take place the following morning in Jacksonville, far from Orange County where Bautista-Anzola was arrested.<\/p>\n
\u201cMr. Kehoe, you\u2019ve been here a long time,\u201d Presnell said before ordering Bautista-Anzola\u2019s release. \u201cYou can\u2019t possibly think it\u2019s reasonable for you to schedule a bond hearing for that time.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Feb. 6, Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated the decision by the Fifth Circuit as a \u201csignificant blow against activist judges\u201d who are undermining the administration\u2019s mass deportation efforts.<\/p>\n
Presnell in open court called it \u201cshocking for the Attorney General of the United States to pejoratively call me an activist judge,\u201d adding that it was if she was calling all federal judges \u201ctraitors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most detainees released by federal judges in Orlando have been represented by attorney Phillip Arroyo in an effort one judge described as \u201cherculean.\u201d<\/p>\n
But with the growing number of detainees learning there is a chance for release, local attorneys are scrambling to fill the need.<\/p>\n
The Orlando Center for Justice, founded in 2016 to provide legal services to people who cannot afford it, never before needed to defend detained migrants in federal courts, said Gisselle Martinez, a co-founder who spent more than a decade practicing immigration law.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have never seen anything like this, and we never expected things would be this bad,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re all trying to learn habeas, something that wasn\u2019t remotely in our plans to start doing so, hopefully, we can protect our clients as much as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Families with loved ones at risk of being detained ought to prepare for a legal fight, saving money to hire an attorney whose practice in federal courts, she added.<\/p>\n
Scheller, well-respected in Central Florida\u2019s legal community, has been pulling together a team of attorneys willing to represent pro bono migrants detained locally. His team includes two former federal prosecutors, he said.<\/p>\n
One such case is already being considered in Jacksonville.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not charging them any money,\u201d he added. \u201cWe\u2019re just doing this because it\u2019s the right thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Arroyo has warned for weeks that bond hearings for his clients, though better that indefinite detention, are an \u201cillusory\u201d remedy as the Trump administration controls immigration courts, which are run by the Justice Department.<\/p>\n
Even if migrants were given bond in immigration court, detainees would have to pay the full amount of the bond, which could be prohibitive. Criminal courts allow bond to be arranged for just 10 percent of the face amount.<\/p>\n
In the last year, there is also a growing backlog in immigration courts, leaving people in ICE detention for days, even weeks, before an immigration judge would consider bond.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you had asked me a year ago, I would have said a lot of immigration judges are relatively neutral and having a bond hearing in front of them is a shot at due process,\u201d Mathur said. \u201cBut since the administration has gutted the immigration courts, the people who are left are either scared that they\u2019re going to lose their jobs so they do exactly what the administration tells them to do or they\u2019re happy to go along with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Days after Presnell ordered Bautista-Anzola, Marquez-Perez and Delgado-Garcia\u2019s release, and in response to inaction by immigration courts, the judge banned the government from re-arresting the pair \u201cuntil further order of the court.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bautista-Anzola said he fled his native Colombia in 2018, arriving in the United States on a tourist visa. He hoped a U.S. judge would hear his asylum case and allow him to stay.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came here because I needed protection,\u201d he said outside the courthouse following his release. \u201cI can\u2019t go anywhere else. I can\u2019t go back to my country.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reynel Bautista-Anzola, Angel Marquez-Perez and Francisco Delgado-Garcia entered the courtroom shackled on Feb. 9 and, walking in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164791,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[25466,147,78565,32791,21432,78564,78561,78566,78563,28714,139,141,140,1221,78562],"class_list":["post-164790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-bond-hearing","tag-central-florida","tag-detaining","tag-federal-court","tag-federal-judges","tag-fifth-circuit","tag-gregory-presnell","tag-immigration-court","tag-indefinite-detention","tag-migrants","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-release","tag-reynel-bautista-anzola"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}