How ICE Withheld Info From a Federal Judge—and Then Smeared Her for It

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security posted a press release on its official website with a large, bold headline: “Activist Biden Judge Releases Violent Criminal Illegal Alien Wanted for Murder.” The release named the federal judge, Melissa DuBose, and went on to accuse her of knowingly freeing a murder suspect because she was “bent on undermining the president’s deportation agenda.”

There was one problem. The judge had no idea about the murder case. That’s because the Justice Department lawyer had failed to include that detail in arguing against release. And that in turn happened because ICE had instructed the DOJ lawyer to withhold it from her.

The case vividly illustrates the untenable position of DOJ lawyers pressed into service to represent Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is hard enough to work as a DOJ lawyer under the new regime, which has shredded the principles of federal prosecution and replaced them with an all-encompassing command to serve at President Donald Trump’s quixotic pleasure. But add ICE as your client, and the difficulty becomes something close to impossible, as attorneys across the country have discovered while trying to represent an agency that ignores legal constraints, exhibits contempt for the rule of law, and withholds information from its own lawyers.

The legal issue at the heart of the case has become one of the defining battles in immigration courts across the country. The Trump administration has taken the position that even people who have been in the country for decades, working, paying taxes, and raising children, are forevermore “applicants for admission,” no different from those who first present themselves at the border.

Over 300 district courts have rejected the administration’s position, but the courts of appeals have split 2–2, and the issue is almost certainly going to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, ICE has earned the ire of court after court across the country. Its contempt for court orders in exactly these kinds of detention cases has been so flagrant that the chief judge of the District of Minnesota found it had likely violated more court orders in January 2026 alone than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.

The case before Judge DuBose was one such case. Bryan Rafael Gomez, a Dominican national who had been living in the United States for years, was detained by ICE in April after a local arrest in Worcester, Massachusetts. His lawyers filed for habeas corpus in the District of Rhode Island. DuBose granted the writ, ordering Gomez released under conditions pending a bond hearing.

What DuBose did not know, because the DOJ had failed to tell her, was that Gomez was the subject of a murder warrant in the Dominican Republic. ICE knew: In fact, it had already published the warrant in its own press release two weeks earlier. But ICE had also told the assistant U.S. attorney handling the habeas case, Kevin Bolan, that he could not disclose the warrant to the court, on the theory that Dominican authorities had not yet formally authorized its use. So Bolan filed a response to the habeas petition that contained nothing about the warrant, nothing about criminal history, nothing about dangerousness or risk of flight.

Two days later, ICE issued the scurrilous press release, accusing DuBose of freeing a wanted murderer. DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis followed up, disparaging the ruling as “yet another example of an activist judge trying to thwart President Trump’s mandate from the American people.”

When DuBose found out that she had been sandbagged, she issued a show-cause order demanding an explanation for why the government should not be held in contempt. At the hearing that followed, Bolan, mortified, apologized without reservation and told the court that ICE had instructed him to withhold the warrant. The first assistant U.S. attorney issued a correction acknowledging that the judge had not known about the warrant and that the ICE press release was wrong. Both Bolan and the first assistant are holdovers from the previous administration and comported themselves accordingly.

DuBose has referred Bolan to a formal disciplinary hearing under the district’s local rules on the question of whether he violated his duty of candor to the court. That is tough medicine for a lawyer who was, as DuBose herself acknowledged, primarily the instrument of ICE’s misconduct rather than its author. Whether he technically violated the duty of candor is a genuine legal question: He followed client instructions, and an argument exists that his deference fell within permissible bounds. But he could have filed something under seal, alerting the judge that material facts existed without publicly disclosing them. Courts handle sensitive information that way as a matter of routine, and DuBose said so explicitly.

The more important point is that DOJ lawyers are the ones who appear before the federal judiciary, making them the only actors in the system the judge can directly call to account. The formal inquiry into Bolan’s conduct will extend, I expect, to scrutiny of ICE’s behavior, which here appears to have been its characteristic mix of fecklessness and contempt.

The whole episode would never happen in a well-functioning executive branch. The deputy attorney general would have phoned her equivalent at DHS, read them the riot act, and instructed them never again to put an AUSA in that position.

But we have the opposite of a well-functioning executive branch. Not only has the mission of every government attorney been redefined as serving Trump personally; ICE, with its cowboy culture and contempt for the law, knows it is a favorite of Trump and Stephen Miller, and that it can operate with near impunity. It is more than content to let the DOJ lawyers who have to stand before the Third Branch take the heat.

As of this writing, the dishonest, incendiary press release is still up on the DHS website.