Background: ICE agents detain a man during an operation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol in St. Paul, Minn., on Jan. 27, 2026. (Photo by Steven Garcia/NurPhoto via AP).
The Trump administration "coerced" a 20-year-old legal resident of the U.S. to sign a document that would enable the government to deport him, a judge ruled this week.
Cornelius Kaihau Holani, a New Zealand resident of Tongan ethnicity, was directly lied to by an officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a three-page filing from U.S. District Judge Noel Wise. The judge ordered the government to release the man from custody.
Holani was "lawfully admitted" to the U.S. on a visa program on July 13, 2023, when he was 17, the jurist for the Northern District of California recounted. His mother holds a green card after marrying Holani's stepfather, a U.S. citizen.
Holani is close to his mother and stepfather — who live in Oakland, California — and is the caregiver for his "elderly" grandmother in Seattle, Washington, Wise noted. He has no criminal record "and no history of immigration enforcement contact of any kind."
On the morning of July 31, 2026, ICE officers "seized" Holani at Oakland International Airport as he waited to board a flight home to Seattle. Four plainclothes ICE agents told him "not to make a scene," put him in a vehicle, "handcuffed his legs and put a chain around his waist."
ICE officers brought the man to an office in San Francisco, California. "There, in the ICE office, having been unlawfully detained without due process, the government coerced Mr. Holani to sign a document," the Joe Biden appointee wrote.
"When Mr. Holani asked whether the document had anything to do with deportation, the officer said, 'No, it's nothing like that,'" Wise went on. Holani, "who never graduated high school," did what the agent instructed, signing "an unknown document that the government now relies upon as a basis for asserting that Mr. Holani waived his right to contest his removal from the country or to adjust his status."
That same day, the Seattle resident filed a habeas petition, arguing he was being illegally confined, detained or imprisoned. The case was assigned to Wise, and she ultimately sided with the petitioner, ordering his release and barring the government from deporting or redetaining him "until the Court has held a hearing with the parties or the Government has provided Petitioner a predeprivation hearing before a neutral decisionmaker."
A hearing in the case was set for Aug. 13.
Habeas petitions and judicial criticism of the government's deportation efforts have been frequent under the Trump administration. According to ProPublica, more than 18,000 habeas petitions were filed in the first 13 months of President Donald Trump's second term, more than under the last three administrations — including Trump's first term — combined.
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