ICE Kept Him from Leaving, Then Punished Him for Staying
A Colombian man bought a ticket, tried to obey a voluntary-departure order and remained detained because the government blocked the departure it later claimed he had missed.
The Ticket Expired in a Cell
Marlon Andres Torres Gomez had been ordered to leave the United States by June 11, 2026. He was prepared to comply. His attorney repeatedly contacted federal immigration officials to coordinate the departure and asked that Torres Gomez be allowed to travel on June 10th. Torres Gomez purchased a one-way airline ticket from New York to Colombia for that date.
The order permitted him to leave. The ticket gave him a way to leave. The government controlled whether he could reach the plane. Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept him in custody.
The flight departed without him, and the June 11th deadline passed. By the time a federal judge ordered his release on July 21st, the deadline ICE had prevented him from meeting was forty days behind him.
Then the government attempted to turn the missed deadline into additional power. Federal attorneys argued that because Torres Gomez had “failed to depart,” an alternate removal order had become final. That, they said, placed him within a different section of immigration law requiring his detention during the removal period.
ICE had prevented him from leaving. The government then tried to use his continued presence as the legal basis for keeping him locked up.
U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz rejected that argument and ordered Torres Gomez promptly released. The ruling did not grant him lawful immigration status, cancel his case, or give him permanent permission to remain in the United States. It established something more fundamental: the government cannot manufacture the violation it later claims the authority to punish.
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The Government Had Already Decided He Could Leave
Voluntary departure is not a declaration that someone has a lawful right to remain in the country. It is a formal process created by Congress that allows an eligible noncitizen to leave within a specified period instead of being forcibly removed.
At the conclusion of immigration proceedings, a person seeking voluntary departure generally must demonstrate good moral character, establish the means and intention to leave, and satisfy other statutory requirements. Federal law can impose a civil penalty and ten years of ineligibility for several forms of immigration relief when a person voluntarily fails to depart within the authorized period.
The distinction between failing to leave and being prevented from leaving is therefore not semantic. It can determine whether the government treats someone as having complied with an immigration judge’s order or as having triggered new penalties and a final removal order.
The arrangement also assumes that the executive branch will make departure possible. Federal regulations permit officials to place conditions on voluntary departure, including continued detention pending departure, or removal under safeguards. Those rules give the government flexibility over how departure occurs. They do not give it permission to make timely departure impossible and blame the person in custody for the result.
Torres Gomez was not asking ICE to disregard the immigration judge’s decision. He was attempting to obey it. His attorney asked officials to coordinate the departure, requested clarification about how he could comply, and identified the June 10th flight. ICE acknowledged that it did not permit him to depart on or before June 11th.
The dispute was therefore not about whether Torres Gomez had been told to leave. It was about whether the government could physically prevent him from following that instruction and then treat its own obstruction as his violation.
The Deadline Became a Source of Power
Once the voluntary-departure deadline expired, the government claimed it had acquired a stronger legal basis to detain Torres Gomez. The legal mechanism was technical, but the consequence was simple. An alternate removal order associated with voluntary departure can become final when the person overstays the departure period. The government argued that the expired deadline therefore started the removal period and made detention mandatory.
That theory treated the calendar as if it had operated independently of the locked door. Farbiarz refused to separate the two. Torres Gomez had not remained in the country because he ignored the order, disappeared, or refused to board the flight. He remained because the agency holding him did not permit him to leave.
“Overstaying” a voluntary-departure period, the judge explained, is generally something the noncitizen does. It is not something done to him by federal officials who keep him confined and prevent his departure.
The government could not claim mandatory detention because Torres Gomez “remained” in the United States when the government itself had prevented him from leaving. Doing so, Farbiarz wrote, would convert conduct that violated due process into a new basis for detention.
That is the constitutional center of the case. A government possesses enormous power when it controls the cell door, the deadline outside it, and the legal consequences that follow when the clock expires.
Due process exists because an executive agency cannot resolve that contradiction merely by consulting its own records after the damage has been done.
The Explanations Came After the Failure
The government offered three principal explanations for keeping Torres Gomez detained.
First, federal attorneys pointed to earlier court injunctions that had prevented officials from removing him. Farbiarz found that the cases involving those injunctions had been closed before the voluntary-departure deadline. More importantly, the orders restricted federal officials. They did not prohibit Torres Gomez from leaving voluntarily.
The court also found no evidence that those injunctions had influenced the decision to keep him detained before the missed flight. They appeared in the government’s legal briefs only after the detention was challenged.
Second, the government noted that the immigration court had offered to extend the departure deadline. That offer came on June 12th, one day after the original deadline had already expired. An extension proposed after ICE prevented compliance could not explain why officials had failed to act before the deadline.
Finally, the government suggested that Torres Gomez had remained detained to protect his ability to appeal the immigration judge’s order.
Farbiarz found that explanation contrary to common sense. Torres Gomez had been actively attempting to depart. There was no document showing that he intended to appeal, and the court credited his account that he told a named ICE official on June 5th that he did not want to pursue an appeal.
These were not reasons communicated through a structured process before the flight departed. They were explanations assembled after the ticket had expired and the missed deadline had become useful to the government’s detention theory.
Due process cannot mean confining a person first and asking government lawyers to construct the justification later.
Due Process Is the Process Before the Error
The Fifth Amendment prohibits the federal government from depriving any person of liberty without due process of law. That protection does not disappear because the person facing confinement is not a citizen.
The court did not hold that Torres Gomez could never be detained. It did not invalidate voluntary departure, removal law, or the government’s authority to enforce immigration judgments. It examined what process had occurred before his post-deadline detention and found no meaningful procedure capable of resolving the obvious conflict between the immigration judge’s order and ICE’s continued custody.
Officials needed to determine who was responsible for coordinating the departure, whether Torres Gomez had waived or declined an appeal, whether any court order actually prevented him from leaving voluntarily, and whether ICE would transport him to the airport, release him in time to travel, or require another arrangement. They also needed to decide what would happen if government delay consumed the remaining days.
Those were not administrative details. They determined whether Torres Gomez could comply with the order, whether penalties might attach to the missed deadline, and whether the government would claim additional authority to confine him.
The risk of error was not theoretical. The error occurred. Torres Gomez remained detained because one part of the government had authorized his departure while another continued holding the key. In Farbiarz’s words, the absence of a structured process made what happened unsurprising. “Due process requires more,” the judge concluded.
“Leave on Your Own Terms” Cannot Be a One-Way Slogan
ICE publicly tells people without lawful status that they should not wait to be arrested. Its self-deportation guidance says they may leave on their own initiative and “on their own terms” rather than spend months in detention awaiting removal.
Torres Gomez’s case involved a formal order of voluntary departure, which is legally distinct from someone informally deciding to leave. However, the government’s public message makes the contradiction more difficult to ignore.
An immigration judge authorized his departure. His attorney tried to coordinate it. Torres Gomez purchased a ticket. ICE kept him detained. The government then argued that the failure to complete the departure it had blocked should produce even more detention.
A policy cannot honestly promote voluntary departure while the government reserves the power to prevent departure and assign the resulting failure to the person in its custody. That is not efficient enforcement. It is an executive failure with a human being trapped inside.
The Ruling Did Not Give Him Permission to Stay
This case should not be exaggerated. Farbiarz did not grant Torres Gomez asylum, lawful permanent residence, or citizenship. The judge did not erase the alternate removal order or declare that Torres Gomez could remain in the country indefinitely.
The court ordered him promptly released and assumed that he would take immediate action to depart voluntarily. It expressly left open whether detention could become lawful later if he remained in the United States. Those limits strengthen the ruling.
The court did not substitute its preferred immigration policy for the one written by Congress. It required the executive branch to respect the conditions of the policy it was already administering.
Torres Gomez may still have to leave, but the government cannot prevent his departure, call the resulting delay his overstay, and inherit new power from the overstay it created.
Due process does not guarantee every person the outcome he wants. It determines whether the government may reach an outcome by trapping someone inside a contradiction of its own making.
Congress Must Find Out How Often the Door Stays Closed
This ruling does not establish that ICE routinely prevents detained people from completing voluntary departure. It establishes that the system permitted it to happen in this case and that federal attorneys later attempted to derive mandatory detention authority from the resulting delay. That is enough to require congressional scrutiny.
When a detained person receives voluntary departure, Congress should require a written coordination process that begins immediately. A responsible official should be identified. The person’s decision about an appeal should be documented. Travel papers, tickets, transportation and release conditions should be resolved before the deadline becomes an emergency.
When government action prevents departure, the clock should stop. A deadline caused by federal custody should not trigger penalties, finality or mandatory detention unless a neutral decision-maker first determines that the individual—not the government—caused the failure to leave.
Congress should also demand the numbers: how many detained people have received voluntary-departure orders, how many departed within the permitted period, how many remained in custody as their deadlines approached, how often an agency delayed or failed to coordinate departure, and how many people were later detained or penalized because a deadline expired while the government continued holding them.
Without those records, officials can describe Torres Gomez’s case as an isolated error. Congress’s responsibility is to determine whether it was isolated before another person loses a flight, a deadline and weeks of liberty inside the same administrative gap.
The people’s branch wrote the immigration laws. It funds the detention facilities, defines the penalties and gives the executive branch authority to carry out removals. It cannot surrender its responsibility when those powers collide behind a locked door.
Our previous reporting suggests this may not be an isolated case:
The Clock Belonged to the Government
Marlon Andres Torres Gomez was told to leave the United States. He bought the ticket. His attorney contacted the officials holding him. He attempted to comply before the deadline, and the government possessed the power to make that compliance possible.
Instead, it controlled the cell, the calendar and the consequence. It kept the door closed until the clock ran out and then pointed to the expired time as evidence that the man inside had failed.
A republic cannot permit its government to operate that way. The law may impose deadlines, authorize detention, and require departure and impose lawful consequences when a person refuses to obey.
However, the government cannot hold someone still and accuse him of failing to move. It cannot create the violation and then inherit new power from the violation it created.
The deadline belonged to Torres Gomez. The locked door belonged to the government. So did the failure.
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Sources:
Kalmbacher, Colin. “‘This Is at Odds with Common Sense’: Judge Grants Habeas Petition after ICE Stops Immigrant Who Bought One-Way Plane Ticket Out of the Country from Self-Deporting.” Law&Crime, July 22, 2026.
“Self-Deportation.” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Accessed July 24, 2026.
Torres Gomez v. Soto et al. “Opinion and Order.” No. 26-cv-7181 (MEF). CourtListener, July 21, 2026.
“8 C.F.R. § 240.25—Voluntary Departure—Authority of the Service.” Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. Accessed July 24, 2026.
“8 C.F.R. § 1241.1—Final Order of Removal.” Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. Accessed July 24, 2026.
“8 U.S.C. § 1229c—Voluntary Departure.” GovInfo, 2024.
The article was excellent but did not adequately explain the importance of voluntary departure. Being able to voluntarily depart means the individual can reapply for admission to the United States at any time. Involuntary departure means the individual may face ten years or more of ineligibility for admission, with additional hurdles that an applicant for admission with no record of deportation has. Individuals faced with a deportation order are often advised to voluntarily depart before having to be deported.
ICE has moved from being the SA to being the SS and will eventually evolve into the Gestapo.
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me