Federal judge orders release of California man who is plaintiff in lawsuit against immigration raids

LOS ANGELES - A federal judge on Thursday ordered the government to release a man arrested by ICE last week amid his involvement in a class action lawsuit challenging immigration raids in Los Angeles.

U.S. District Judge Michelle Williams ordered the government to immediately release Isaac Antonio Villegas Molina, a Pasadena resident who was detained a week ago during a check-in with ICE. Williams also prohibited the government from re-detaining Villegas without providing notice and a hearing before a "neutral adjudicator."

In her order, Williams noted that the government had not contested the request last week for Villegas' release, "suggesting that his re-detention may have been unwarranted."

As of Thursday afternoon, Villegas' immigration attorney said they were waiting confirmation that he had been released.

Villegas sued the federal government last year, after he and two other day laborers were arrested by immigration agents on June 18 as they waited at a Pasadena bus stop. An immigration judge ordered Villegas, who is from Panama, released on a $5,000 bond the following month and he had been checking in with ICE since then.

He is scheduled to go before an immigration judge on Friday, on a motion to terminate removal proceedings against him.

Immigration attorneys and advocates said they believed Villegas was detained in retaliation for the lawsuit. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson previously told the Los Angeles Times Villegas was detained "after multiple violations of his supervised release - including missing required check-ins."

Villegas' attorney said that he has followed every rule of his supervised release.

"This is just absolute harassment," Villegas' immigration lawyer, Stacy Tolchin, said Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge's order Thursday.

Following Villegas' arrest last week, Tolchin filed a habeas petition in federal court, challenging his incarceration and demanding his immediate release. In it, Tolchin described the lawsuit as "one of the first cases filed challenging the Trump Administration's immigration roving patrols as violative of the Fourth Amendment."

In a separate application for a temporary restraining order seeking Villegas' release, Tolchin said immigration officials arrested and detained her client "without legal cause in violation of precedent and due process."

"By doing so the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sought to change venue from the current immigration judge on the nondetained docket to the detained Adelanto immigration calendar, unabashedly engaging in forum shopping for a more favorable judge," Tolchin said.

Tolchin argued that the Adelanto immigration court "is a friendlier forum for DHS" and noted that four of the five immigration judges "have denial rates of asylum of almost 88 percent."

The judge Villegas is set to go before on Friday has a denial rate of only 55%, according to Tolchin.

"This forum shopping is consistent with DHS' efforts to undermine the neutrality of the immigration removal process," Tolchin said in her filing.

In granting the temporary restraining order, Williams ordered the government to return Villegas' removal proceedings to the "nondetained docket."

"We welcome this swift and much-needed relief for Isaac, which is a testament to the blatant illegality of the government's actions," said Lauren Wilfong, a lawyer with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. "ICE must be held accountable for their egregious and indefensible actions."

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Counsel, other groups and private attorneys filed the lawsuit - now known as Vasquez Perdomo vs. Mullin - on behalf of several immigrant rights groups, Villegas and two other mmigrants picked up at a bus stop, and two U.S. citizens, one of whom was held despite showing agents his identification.

Villegas was waiting with other day laborers, including Pedro Vasquez Perdomo and Carlos Osorto, when masked armed men aggressively approached and arrested them "based on their appearance," Tolchin said in the habeas petition. The arrests unfolded as part of Operation at Large, a large-scale immigration operation in Southern California.

The Vasquez Perdomo lawsuit resulted in an initial temporary restraining order that was upheld by the 9th Circuit. That restraining order was later stayed by the Supreme Court. The case remains ongoing, with a preliminary injunction hearing scheduled for September.

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This story was originally published April 23, 2026 at 5:02 PM.