Marlon Andres Torres Gomez was trying to leave the country. An immigration judge had granted him voluntary departure with a deadline of June 11, and he did exactly what that kind of order contemplates: he bought a one-way ticket from New York to Colombia for June 10, and his attorneys repeatedly contacted immigration officials to arrange his departure [1].
ICE did not let him board. The agency kept him detained at the Delaney Hall facility in New Jersey as the June 11 deadline came and went [1][2]. Then it made an argument that turned the situation inside out: because Torres Gomez had 'failed to depart,' it said, he was now subject to mandatory detention [1].
The missed flight became the reason to keep holding him - a flight the agency itself had prevented him from taking. Continued detention was justified by a deadline the government caused him to miss [1].
On July 22 and 23, US District Judge Michael Farbiarz of the District of New Jersey granted Torres Gomez's habeas petition and ordered him promptly released [2]. The court found he had remained in the United States only because officials kept him in custody and blocked the June 10 flight he had bought to comply - a position the judge called 'at odds with common sense' [2].
The ruling closes a loop that otherwise runs one way. Without it, an agency could stop someone from leaving on a voluntary-departure order and then cite the missed deadline as grounds to detain them indefinitely - the government manufacturing the reason for a person's own jailing [1][2].
