I'm not coming home': Trump policy holds people in Ice custody without bail

Source: The Guardian

Sat 30 Aug 2025 07.00 EDT
Last modified on Sat 30 Aug 2025 07.01 EDT


Liset Fernandez spent most of the summer worried about her dad, Luis, but a few weeks ago she got some good news. After being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody for weeks, an immigration judge in Texas granted him release on a $5,000 bond.

Luis, came to the US from Ecuador in 1994, had been held in detention at a facility in Livingston, Texas, thousands of miles away from his home in Queens. Liset, 17, had taken on extra shifts working a retail job to support her mom and nine-year-old brother. Luis’s co-workers at the Square diner, a railcar-style greasy spoon in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood for over 100 years, had raised more than $20,000 to support him and his family.

But when Liset logged on to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) website to pay the bond, she got a message telling her that her dad was ineligible for release. It fell to her to tell her dad that instead of coming home that day, he would remain detained. “It was upsetting for everyone,” Liset said. “His voice sounded completely disappointed.”

Luis was being detained because of a new DHS policy arguing that all people who enter the US illegally are ineligible for bond, regardless of how long they have been here and whether or not they pose a flight risk. In Fernandez’s case, DHS went even further, deploying a rarely used maneuver to pause the immigration judge’s bond ruling while it appealed his ruling. Federal regulations allow the agency to automatically stay an immigration judge’s bond decision while they appeal the case to the board of immigration appeals.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/30/immigration-custody-bail-trump