Three months after a federal judge ordered ICE to release José Yugar-Cruz from Muscatine County Jail, ICE has detained the 36-year-old asylum seeker from Bolivia again. ICE has not accused Yugar-Cruz, who has no criminal record, of violating the terms of his release or any other infractions. ICE plans to deport him to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country in Central Africa to which Yugar-Cruz has no ties.
In January, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher ordered Yugar-Cruz’s release, after he’d spent 11 months held in various jails on orders from ICE. The judge’s orders resulted from a lawsuit attorneys in the University of Iowa College of Law’s Immigration Clinic filed on Yugar-Cruz’s behalf. The lawsuit argued that since an immigration judge had already granted Yugar-Cruz “withholding-of-removal-relief,” his continued detention was unlawful.
Withholding-of-removal-relief prevents an immigrant from being deported to their country of origin because it would expose them to persecution or endanger their life. In early December, an immigration judge found that Yugar-Cruz faced a credible threat of torture if he was returned to Bolivia. That protection, however, does not prevent ICE from deporting Yugar-Cruz to a different country, even one accused of human rights violations, and would not prevent that country from sending him back to Bolivia.
“This is exactly what asylum law is meant to stop,” Getsy Hernandez of Escucha Mi Voz Iowa (EMV) said in a statement after ICE seized Yugar-Cruz. “Deporting people to countries they’ve never lived in — with no support and real danger — is putting their lives at risk, and it must end. No deportations to third countries.”
Just hours after ICE took Yugar-Cruz into custody on Wednesday morning, attorneys representing him from Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid filed a request for an emergency order to stop his deportation in federal court in Des Moines. On Wednesday afternoon, Judge Locher issued an order preventing ICE or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from taking Yugar-Cruz out of Iowa without the court’s permission.
“Locher also gave the U.S. Department of Justice until April 13 to file affidavits and exhibits establishing the lawfulness of Yugar-Cruz’s detention and to make a recommendation as to whether an evidentiary hearing in the matter should be conducted,” Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
José Yugar-Cruz fled Bolivia in 2024 after being tortured by corrupt local police officers for refusing to help them with their illegal drug operation, according to court filings in his asylum case. He made his way to the U.S., where he has family. Yugar-Cruz crossed the border into Arizona in July. He immediately surrendered to immigration officials and was jailed by ICE. While in custody, Yugar-Cruz began the process of applying for asylum, because of the threat to his life in his home country.
Before the second Trump administration, it would have been common for someone like Yugar-Cruz to be released from custody with orders to check in at the nearest ICE office on a regular schedule while his asylum application was pending. But ICE did not release him.
Yugar-Cruz was sent from Arizona to the Freeborn County Adult Detention Center in Albert Lea, Minnesota. According to court documents, an ICE agent there told him in February last year that he would be released in “15 days or so.” But ICE did not release him.
In December 2025, Yugar-Cruz was transferred to Muscatine County jail, which has a contract with ICE to incarcerate detainees. It was there that Yugar-Cruz, with the support of EMV, an eastern Iowa nonprofit that assists and advocates for immigrants, acquired legal representation through the UI College of Law’s Immigration Clinic. He was finally released during the first week of January.
“I was 18 months away from my family and they wanted me to join them,” Yugar-Cruz told the people at EMV Community Defense Training event in Iowa City shortly after being released. “What saved me was, first of all, God and my faith, the community, my lawyers and now, Escucha Mi Voz. What’s key in this moment is that I was not alone, ICE was not able to disappear me.”
On Monday, the Trump administration announced an agreement in which the Democratic Republic of Congo would accept people deported by ICE who have no connection to the country.
“The U.S. has struck such third-country deportation deals with at least seven other African nations, many of them among countries hit the most by the Trump administration’s policies that have restricted trade, aid and migration,” according to the Associated Press.
The Trump administration has entered into third-country deportation deals with countries in Latin America, as well as Africa, but ICE does not plan to send Yugar-Cruz to a country where Spanish is the official language. It’s not clear if the third-country deportations the administration started last year conform to international law. Many of the countries involved have poor human rights records.
“The Trump administration has spent at least $40 million to deport about 300 migrants to countries other than their own, according to a report released recently by the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” the AP reported.
In addition to having concerns over the conditions people deported by the U.S. will be held in, advocates for immigrants are also worried that the Trump administration is using third-party deportations to evade legal protections granted to immigrants like Yugar-Cruz, because the authority of U.S. courts does not extend to the foreign countries taking the deportees. DRC is not bound by Yugar-Cruz’s withholding-of-removal and could deport him to Bolivia.
In a statement earlier this week, the DRC said it does not plan to automatically transfer U.S. deportees to their home countries or other destinations.
“Each situation will be subject to individual review in accordance with the laws of the Republic and national security requirements,” according to the statement.
