Baltodano v. Bondi

Decided in two stages by Judge Lasnik. On 7 November 2025 the court granted a preliminary injunction on the notice and procedure claim, but refused the punitive claim, holding that the record before it lacked the specificity and examples regarding third-country imprisonment that were present in Nguyen v. Scott. On 4 December 2025, on a fuller record, the court granted the habeas petition, ordered release on conditions, and held that the practice of third-country removal paired with imprisonment is intended to be punitive and violates due process under Wong Wing v. United States, 163 U.S. 228, 236-38 (1896) and Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693-94 (2001). Wong Wing struck down a provision of the Chinese Exclusion Act imposing imprisonment at hard labour before removal, holding that Congress may expel but may not add infamous punishment without a trial by jury, and distinguishing detention while awaiting deportation from punishment. Adopting the formulation used four days earlier in Hambarsonpour v. Bondi, the court ordered the government not to remove the petitioner to any third country where he is likely to face imprisonment or harm. The petitioner held deferral of removal to Nicaragua under the Convention against Torture, had been detained about twenty-four months, and the government had not requested travel documents from any third country. Two further passages matter. The court set out at length the account given in D.A. v. Noem, in which Judge Chutkan of the District of Columbia described five people who held withholding or deferral of removal being woken in the middle of the night at an ICE facility, shackled, put aboard a United States military cargo plane and flown to Ghana, a country none had any connection to, and taken to Dema Camp, described as a remote open-air detention facility surrounded by armed military guards. Judge Chutkan wrote that the case was "not an outlier" but part of what appeared to be "a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government's legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly." Judge Lasnik called that account deeply concerning. Second, the court declined to go further. It recorded the petitioner's concern that the government is using third states as bridge countries to send people onward to the very country a United States immigration court has barred removal to, said it shared that concern, but found no sufficiently clear evidence of punitive intent on that record. It noted that the argument could be made in the reopened removal proceedings its own order required.

Caution The government appealed on 30 January 2026 and then withdrew the appeal. On 7 April 2026 the Ninth Circuit granted the appellant's own motion for voluntary dismissal under Rule 42(b) of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure and ordered that the dismissal order serve as the mandate. No. 26-10166, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 10166. The judgment was never reviewed on its merits and was never reversed. The injunction stands, and the government chose not to test it on appeal. The punitive holding in this line of cases traces back to Nguyen v. Scott, decided on 21 August 2025. This opinion records that Nguyen was voluntarily dismissed by its petitioner the following month after an agreement between the parties, and so never reached a merits decision. The findings that Abubaka, Hambarsonpour and this case all rest on were therefore made at the preliminary injunction stage of a case that was then settled. That does not make them wrong, and three courts have since adopted them on their own records, but anyone relying on this line should know where it begins. Note also the sequence within this case: the same judge refused the punitive claim in November for want of specific evidence about imprisonment in destination countries, and granted it in December once that evidence was supplied. The petitioner had twenty-four convictions and still obtained the injunction, because the protection does not depend on the record of the person invoking it. The court's refusal to find punitive intent in the use of bridge countries is a limit on the decision and is recorded above rather than left out.

Unconstitutional punishment Wong Wing Infamous punishment Third-country removal Fifth Amendment due process Prolonged detention (Zadvydas) CAT CAT deferral Notice Reopened removal proceedings

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