Judge Orders Release of Venezuelan Couple Again and Prohibits Further Rearrests

Federal District Court Judge David Briones issued a blistering order not only to release Luddis Norelia Sanchez Garcia and Julio Cesar Sanchez Puentes again, but also not to rearrest them again on an Alien Enemies Act claim, and not to deport anyone else being detained as enemy aliens in the Western District of Texas without 21 days written notice in a language they understand spelling out their right to judicial review.

The Western District of Texas ranges from El Paso to San Antonio, a span of roughly 400 miles. While detained in El Paso, the couple were presented with notification in English, which they cannot read, to inform them that they were designated as “alien enemies.” Immigration personnel use that designation to rapidly deport people, including renditioning men to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador.

From February through April, the couple have been arrested and detained multiple times and have gone in front of four judges, two in Maryland where they live with their three children and two in El Paso where they were recently ordered to appear 14 April on misdemeanor charges filed in February 2025 for their crossing of the border into El Paso in 2022. A federal magistrate in El Paso ruled 14 April set a court date in June and let them go free on bail until then. Having appeared in court as ordered, their most recent arrest was 16 April at El Paso International Airport on their way home to Maryland.

They brought their children with them across the border and turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. They received protected temporary status and have applied for asylum when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced TPS will be terminated ahead of schedule.

Briones said prosecutorial allegations against the couple were based on “multiple levels of hearsay, hidden within declarations of declarants who have no personal knowledge about the facts they are attesting to.”

This court takes clear offense to respondents wasting judicial resources to admit to the court it has no evidence, yet seek to have this court determine petitioner Sanchez Puentes is ‘guilty by association’ [by being married to his wife]. 

It is clear as day that respondents have not demonstrated to this court by a ‘preponderance of evidence,’ let alone the required ‘clear, unequivocal, and convincing’ evidence that petitioner Sanchez Puentes is a member of TdA, nor that he is an ‘alien enemy.’

Briontes ruled Sanchez Puentes cannot be labeled an “alien enemy” and “his continued confinement on these grounds is therefore unlawful. Petitioner Sanchez Puentes must be released.”

About Sanchez Garcia, Briones said federal officials “contradict themselves throughout the entire record.”

Respondents claim petitioner Sanchez Garcia is somehow both ‘a money receiver and lookout’ as well as a ‘senior member of TdA.’

Respondents ask this court to accept their claims, going off of nearly nothing, to substantiate their mammoth claims that Petitioner Sanchez Garcia is a ‘senior member,’ or perhaps just a ‘member,’ or maybe at the least an ‘affiliate’ of TdA.” The court would not accept this evidence even in a case where only nominal damages were at stake, let alone what is at stake here.

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