If that doesn’t bring you to tears and make you want to curse Trump, DHS, ICE and the ice in the veins of the people who implement these policies, probably nothing will.
As reported at KTVU, a Bay Area television station website:
A federal immigration judge in San Francisco on Wednesday released an Oakland father of three out on $5,000 bond after he had been held in ICE custody for the last nine months.
Immigration Judge Alison E. Daw declared that Ricardo Mercado, 38 – held in the West County Detention Facility in Richmond since July 11, 2017 – was not a danger to society and not a flight risk with the amount of money his wife, Lilia Perez, posted immediately after the hearing. She ran to the bank to get a cashier's check.
Turns out Mercado is a victim of a particularly cruel, recent (in February, 2018) Supreme Court ruling.
Mercado is one of the estimated 40,000 undocumented immigrants held in the 112 ICE detention facilities… He was… caught up in a Supreme Court decision... where the justices declared that undocumented immigrants do not have the right to periodic bond hearings and can remain in custody indefinitely.
Fortunately for him, judges in the 9th Circuit are not interpreting that Supreme Court decision as a ‘must’ but as a ‘may’ …
The first example was on March 13, when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Floricel Liborio Ramos … should be released from detention under appropriate supervision conditions as she awaits her final deportation hearing. The judge in that case said that the Supreme Court did not rule that detainees must be held without the chance for a bond hearing, the justices ruled that they may be held. ...
Unfortunately, detainees in other jurisdictions have no be so blessed:
… Immigrant rights attorney Jehan Laner Romero explained that the district court judges within the 9th Circuit, are unique with their recent detainee rulings, as a legal precedent in this circuit allowed for more lenient interpretations. Lower court immigration judges across the country, she said, are mostly interpreting the case more conservatively, ruling that detainees in several categories should be denied these bond hearings.
It’s time to #DeportICE, preferably to another galaxy, far far away.