BERKELEY, California — A federal judge on Monday, November 9, ordered immigration officials to immediately release Paula Valentina Albornoz Hernandez, a 23-year-old student at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been held in immigration detention since agents stopped her at San Francisco International Airport on October 30. U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins ruled that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violated Albornoz Hernandez's right to due process, granting both her habeas corpus petition and a temporary restraining order, The Daily Californian reported.
Source: The Daily Californian
UC Berkeley confirmed the ruling in a campuswide message sent Monday. “We're relieved and overjoyed to share that, this morning, a federal judge ordered the release of our student, Paula Albornoz Hernandez,” Chancellor Richard K. Lyons wrote, in a message co-signed by Interim Vice Chancellor for Equity & Inclusion Fabrizio Mejia, Interim Associate Vice Chancellor Gina Daly and Undocumented Student Program Director Liliana Iglesias. “This is a moment to remember what's possible when our community comes together to support one of our own.”
Source: UC Berkeley News
The ruling: people in her position must be notified before they are detained
Judge Coggins ruled that noncitizens who overstay a visa and are “not detained within a reasonable time” after the visa expires gain a protected liberty interest — which means immigration enforcement agencies must first notify them before they are detained, The Daily Californian reported. Albornoz Hernandez's detention, carried out more than three years after her permission to stay expired in March 2023 and with no prior notice, did not meet that standard, the judge found.
The order does more than open the detention-centre gate. It temporarily bars immigration officials from electronically monitoring Albornoz Hernandez, and it requires seven days' notice and a bond hearing before she can be re-detained. ICE must also notify the court within three days confirming that she has been released.
Detained at the airport on October 30
ICE agents detained Albornoz Hernandez at San Francisco International Airport on October 30 while she was waiting to board a flight with her boyfriend — a domestic trip to Portland, according to earlier reporting on the case. She spent part of that first weekend at a detention site in Stockton and was then transferred to the California City Detention Facility in Kern County, in the Mojave Desert — the largest ICE detention centre in California, where she remained until Monday's order.
Albornoz Hernandez is a citizen of Colombia who entered the United States with a valid visa in September 2022 — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said she entered on September 6, 2022, with permission to remain until March 6, 2023, and did not leave. She transferred to UC Berkeley from San Jose City College this year to study business administration at the Haas School of Business, in the undergraduate Class of 2028. Her attorney, Niko De Bremaeker of the Oakland-based nonprofit Centro Legal de la Raza, told The Daily Californian that she has a pending asylum case after facing gender-based violence, and has said she has no criminal record or prior arrests.
DHS's position, stated before Monday's ruling, was that a pending case changes nothing about her status. “Work authorization or a pending application does NOT confer legal status in the United States,” a DHS spokesperson said, adding that she “will receive due process and remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.” Judge Coggins's ruling is a direct judicial answer to that position on the custody question: whatever her immigration status, the court held, the way she was detained violated due process.
Source: Poets&Quants for Undergrads
A campus that mobilised
Her lawyers at Centro Legal de la Raza filed the habeas corpus petition in federal court on November 2, arguing the arrest violated federal law and the Constitution because it was carried out without a warrant and without any assessment of whether she was a flight risk. Chancellor Lyons wrote to immigration officials asking that she be allowed to return to her studies, calling her “one of our outstanding students,” and Berkeley Mayor Adena Ishii and U.S. Representative Lateefah Simon both publicly called for her release. Last Wednesday, nearly 300 students protested on Sproul Plaza, the campus's central square, demanding she be freed.
Her legal team and a UC Berkeley spokesperson have both said the case appears to be the first ICE detention of an active Berkeley student since the current administration's mass-deportation push began — a point that turned one student's arrest into a test case watched across California's public universities, which enrol large numbers of international students, including many from Punjab and India on study visas in the Central Valley and the Bay Area.
De Bremaeker, who visited the California City facility, was blunt about the conditions his client is now ordered out of. “It's an atrocious facility,” he told The Daily Californian. “It's not where human beings should be. It's in the middle of the desert. The facilities are horrendous. There's wholly insufficient medical care. Food is incredibly problematic. Human beings should not be there.” Those are the attorney's characterisations, offered in advocacy for his client; ICE has not responded to them in the reporting reviewed.
Monday's order ends Albornoz Hernandez's detention and shields her from being re-detained without notice and a bond hearing. It does NOT decide her asylum claim or her right to remain in the United States: her immigration case continues separately, with a hearing on November 17.
What happens next
Three clocks now run. ICE has three days to confirm her release to the court. Any attempt to detain her again first requires seven days' notice and a bond hearing, at which the government would have to justify custody. And on November 17, her immigration-court hearing — separate from this federal custody case — takes up the underlying question of her status and her pending asylum application. For the thousands of international students and visa holders in California watching this case, the ruling's wider significance is the principle Judge Coggins set down: long-settled overstay, on its own, does not allow the government to detain first and explain later — notice comes first.