San Diego immigrant released after 7 weeks in custody

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A Turkish immigrant who fled his country after being tortured is now home with his wife in San Diego after being detained for about seven weeks by US authorities.

Idris Demirtas25, was released only after a federal judge in the Southern District of California granted a habeas corpus petition, finding that his detention was unjustified. An immigration judge ruled in Demirtas’ favor a week earlier, but she made the decision contingent on a federal lawsuit.

His arrest during a routine immigration check and his 48-day detention reflect some of the the Trump administration a tough enforcement tactic since the Republican took office a year ago promising to deport 1 million people a year.

“I really grew a lot through this process, but we lost a lot emotionally and mentally,” said May Bovenzi, Demirtas’ wife. “I hope our mental health will return to normal. I feel like we were so misinformed and I saw constitutional rights being taken away right before my eyes.”

The couple, who married in May, missed their first holiday season because of the ordeal, but plan to “celebrate in their own way now,” his wife said. She added that she is grateful for all the support her family has received.

“My body didn’t want to sleep last night because I was afraid I would dream that I was in prison,” Demirtas said of his first night home.

Demirtas was arrested Nov. 20 when he served a warrant to appear for a routine ICE check in San Diego at the Edward Schwartz federal courthouse.

He was among hundreds who were arrested in California last year while appearing for immigration checks or court hearings. His background would make his detention unlikely during the Biden administration. He is married to a US citizen and has a pending green card application. He has no criminal record, a lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security confirmed during a hearing last week. He is from a country with a human rights record criticized by the State Department and arrived in the United States after fleeing religious persecution. He said in court documents that he was tortured in Turkey because of his religious beliefs.

Despite that story and an immigration judge ruling that he could be released on bail on Dec. 30, Demirtas remained held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center until a district judge granted his habeas petition and he was released Tuesday evening.

Lawyers are increasingly turning to federal courts to secure the release of their clients due to disruptions in the immigration justice system. The Trump administration has fired more than 100 immigration judges across the country, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges.

In California, more than a quarter of federal immigration judges have been fired, retired or left since Trump took office in January 2025. In San Francisco, at least 12 immigration judges are fired or left without clear explanations, exacerbating a backlog of 100,000 cases in the region it covers.

A spokesman for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the courts, said her office declined to comment on personnel matters.

“Unforgiving System”

In July 2025, the Trump administration issued a directive that required mandatory detention for nearly all noncitizens who entered the United States without authorization.

“Based on how unforgiving the immigration system is right now, great people are just giving up,” said Matthew Holt, Demirtas’ immigration attorney. “It’s sad to watch it after the generations of sacrifices they’ve made.”

Holt and other attorneys said the new system of holding more people and keeping them out on bail or parole is like a “war of attrition,” a military strategy in which one side wears the other down by depleting their resources and morale.

In September, about 7,079 immigration court cases nationwide ended with voluntary departure, which allows a person to leave the country within a certain period of time and usually carries fewer penalties than a deportation order. This is the highest number ever recorded in a single month, by data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which stores information on cases since 1997. For California cases, that total is 408.

“I’ve personally experienced people with valid claims, or any valid claims, before the hearing, before their testimony, saying, ‘I want a removal order. I want to leave. I can’t take it anymore,'” said Jeremiah Johnson, a former San Francisco immigration judge who was fired Nov. 21 in an email without explanation.

Federal judges rule against detention

A spokesman for the Department of Justice declined to comment. Earlier, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin stressed that Demirtas entered the country illegally.

“To be clear, having an application pending with USCIS or being eligible for a green card does not grant anyone legal status,” McLaughlin said of the case.

Department of Homeland Security budget document from 2024 says it costs an average of $217 a day for ICE to detain someone in San Diego, meaning U.S. taxpayers paid about $10,416 to detain Demirtas before the agency finally agreed to release him.

Before President Donald Trump’s second term, federal court cases known as habeas corpus were not regularly used in immigration cases. Habeas corpus is the constitutional right that ensures people have a chance to challenge their imprisonment before a judge.

In 2025 hundreds of habeas cases were filed in the Southern District of California, and thousands were filed for immigration detainers across the country. So far in 2026, about a dozen such cases have already been filed in the Southern District of California, according to habeasdockets.orgsite that tracks such requests.

Federal judges have systematically rejected Trump’s mandatory detention policy. In one recent filing in the Southern District of New YorkUS District Judge Louis A. Kaplan noted that noncitizens won their habeas petitions in 350 of 362 cases in federal district courts. He wrote that “160 different judges sitting in about 50 different courts in the United States” made the decisions.

New positions for “deportation judges”

Immigration courts operate within the executive branch, not the independent judicial branch that oversees the federal courts. The courts are housed under the Justice Department, giving the Trump administration more power over immigration judges. Unlike criminal courts, lawyers are not assigned to those who cannot afford legal representation.

Department of Justice recently started advertising vacancies for “deportation judges,” specifically for officers located in San Francisco, Santa Ana, Sacramento and Los Angeles, where applicants are invited to “combat fraud and ensure that those who seek to exploit vulnerabilities in our immigration system are unsuccessful.”

A Justice Department spokesman said the effort was aimed at “restoring the integrity of our immigration system.”

“After four years of the Biden administration forcing immigration courts to implement de facto amnesty for hundreds of thousands of aliens, this Department of Justice is restoring the integrity of our immigration system and encouraging talented lawyers to join our mission to protect national security and public safety,” she wrote in an emailed statement.

The Trump administration has also temporarily appointed military attorneys to act as immigration judges, which some experts say could violate posse comitatus, the 19th-century law that defines what can the military do on US soil.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.