A federal judge in Louisiana released four illegal immigrants from ICE custody on Feb. 6 — individuals whose combined criminal records include homicide convictions, child sex crimes, kidnapping, armed assault, and drug dealing. Every one of them had already been ordered deported. One of those deportation orders is older than most college freshmen.
Fox News reported that Judge John deGravelles, an Obama appointee sitting on the Middle District Court of Louisiana, granted the releases.
The four defendants are Ibrahim Ali Mohammed, an Ethiopian citizen convicted of sexual exploitation of a minor; Luis Gaston-Sanchez, a Cuban citizen convicted of homicide, assault, robbery, and other offenses; Ricardo Blanco Chomat, a Cuban citizen convicted of homicide, kidnapping, aggravated assault with a firearm, burglary, robbery, larceny, and selling cocaine; and Francisco Rodriguez-Romero, convicted of homicide and a weapons offense.
Not one of them had any legal right to remain in the United States. Immigration judges had already said so — years ago, in some cases decades ago.
The timeline tells its own story:
Rodriguez-Romero's deportation order predates the invention of Google. Gaston-Sanchez's came down three weeks after 9/11. Blanco Chomat's was issued while the World Trade Center wreckage was still being cleared. And yet all four remained in the country long enough to end up before a federal judge who decided ICE shouldn't hold them.
Mohammed, for his part, was released into the United States by the Biden administration — and later convicted of sexually exploiting a child. His removal order came last year. Now he's back out again, courtesy of Judge deGravelles.
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin did not mince words. On the judge's decision:
"Releasing these monsters is inexcusably reckless. President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing the law and arresting illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country."
McLaughlin laid out the stakes in human terms:
"The ramifications will only be the continued rape, murder, assault, and robbery of more American victims."
And on the administration's posture going forward:
"We are applying the law as written. If an immigration judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period."
That word — "period" — is doing exactly the work it should. Immigration judges already adjudicated these cases. Final orders of removal were issued through the legal process the left claims to revere. The law spoke. Then a federal judge overruled the law's own conclusion.
This is the part of the immigration debate that never makes it into polite Beltway conversation. Everyone talks about the border.
Fewer people talk about what happens when the system actually works — when an illegal immigrant is arrested, convicted, ordered removed — and then a single federal judge waves them back onto American streets.
The legal reasoning behind deGravelles's decision remains opaque. No explanation from the judge or from the defendants' legal representatives has surfaced publicly. What we do know is the outcome: four individuals with serious violent criminal histories, all subject to final deportation orders, walking free from federal custody.
This is what the institutional resistance to immigration enforcement looks like in practice. It doesn't announce itself with protests or press conferences.
It operates through procedural rulings in district courts, one release order at a time, shielded by the complexity of the legal system from the scrutiny it deserves.
The deGravelles ruling lands in an ironic setting. In September 2025, DHS announced a partnership with Louisiana to expand ICE detention capacity at Louisiana State Penitentiary — Angola Prison — creating what's been dubbed the "Louisiana Lockup" to house criminal illegal immigrants arrested by ICE.
So the state is building detention space while a federal judge sitting in the same state empties it. Louisiana's elected officials partner with the federal government to detain dangerous illegal immigrants. An unelected judge puts them back on the street. The system fights itself — and the public loses.
It's worth pausing on the sheer breadth of criminal conduct represented by these four individuals. Between them:
These are not people who overstayed a visa and got caught up in bureaucratic limbo. These are convicted violent criminals who were never supposed to be here in the first place, committed serious crimes against people living here, and were ordered removed through the legal process. At every stage, the system identified them as dangers. At every stage except the last one, the system acted accordingly.
The left's framework for immigration enforcement has always contained a fatal contradiction. They insist they support deporting "the worst offenders" — the murderers, the sex criminals, the violent repeat offenders.
This is the concession they make in every debate to sound reasonable. But when the enforcement apparatus actually targets exactly those people, the judicial infrastructure the left spent decades building intervenes to stop it.
If not these four, then who? If a man convicted of homicide with a 25-year-old deportation order doesn't qualify for ICE detention, what standard would? The question answers itself. There is no standard that satisfies the institutional opposition to enforcement. The goalposts don't move — they evaporate.
The administration has made its position clear. DHS is expanding detention capacity. ICE is executing arrests. The legal framework — final orders of removal issued by immigration judges — already supports the deportation of all four individuals. The obstacle isn't the law. It's a judge who decided the law's conclusion wasn't good enough.
Somewhere tonight, four convicted violent criminals are free. Not because they were exonerated. Not because their deportation orders were overturned on the merits.
Not because anyone argued they pose no danger to the public. A federal judge simply opened the door — and three decades of deportation orders meant nothing.
