For the third time, a judge in Iowa has ordered the federal government to provide a bond hearing for a truck driver detained 10 weeks ago by the Iowa State Patrol and immigration officials.
U.S. District Judge Stephen H. Locher ruled this week that the government must provide a hearing at which truck driver Suraj Vasal, currently detained in the Polk County Jail, can argue for his release on bond while the government seeks to deport him.
In his ruling, Locher took issue with U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa David Waterman, who argued that while the government’s current position of holding immigration detainees without bond hearings is contrary to years of past practice, it’s also a case of “better late than never” in enforcing immigration laws.
Locher disagreed with that assessment and said of the government, “In their view, not only can they upend dozens of years of practice, but they can do so retroactively … Beyond a traffic infraction, there is no evidence that [Vasal] has violated the law since being released or that he is a flight risk. To the contrary, the record shows that he is gainfully and legally employed.”
Locher ordered the federal government to provide Vasal with a bond hearing by April 30. Should the government fail to do so, he said, it must immediately release Vasal from custody.
The decision marks the third time Locher has ordered a bond hearing in the case.
First order: Due process rights violated
Court records show Vasal came to the United States from India four years ago seeking asylum. Within hours, immigration authorities stopped him, then released him on his own recognizance.
On Feb. 11, 2026, with his asylum application still pending, Vasal was driving a commercial semitruck on Interstate 80 in Iowa when he failed to stop at a weigh station. Iowa State Patrol Trooper Nathaniel Rippey ticketed Vasal and then, as part of “Operation ICE Wall,” alerted Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to the stop. ICE officers then took custody of Vasal and transferred him to the Polk County Jail.
Initially, Vasal was denied a bond hearing, with the Omaha immigration court relying on the Trump administration’s position that people who have lived in the United States for months or years are subject to the same sort of “mandatory detention” faced by people who are apprehended at the border.
Vasal’s attorney, Alexander Smith, challenged that decision by taking the matter to U.S. District Court, arguing his client’s due process rights were being violated.
On Feb. 24, 2026, U.S. District Judge Stephen H. Locher agreed and gave the immigration court seven days in which to provide Vasal with a hearing where he could make his case for release on bond while his deportation case was pending.
Second order: ICE actions border on ‘bad faith’
Three days after Locher’s ruling, ICE agents approached Vasal in his jail cell at 10 a.m. and told him that he was to appear, via Zoom, for a hearing of some kind in 30 minutes. Vasal participated in the hearing, which turned out to be the court-ordered bond hearing he was initially denied.
At the hearing, Vasal asked for more time so he could arrange for legal representation. The court denied the request and proceeded with the hearing, at which ICE officials argued that Vasal’s failure to stop at the weigh station suggested he was both a flight risk and a danger to the community. The immigration judge denied Vasal bond.
Smith went back to district court, arguing that ICE and the immigration court had engaged in “malicious compliance” with Locher’s Feb. 24 order.
“The [government’s] ‘bond hearing’ was a sham imposed on Mr. Vasal with no notice and no reasonable opportunity to retain an attorney or prepare for his bond hearing,” Smith argued in court filings.
Locher agreed and in a sharply worded March 24 ruling, he ruled Vasal’s rights were violated by the actions of both Homeland Security and the immigration judge.
The government’s actions, Locher said, “test the border of bad faith.” In essence, he stated, the government’s “position is that it is acceptable to force a pro se party to participate in a hearing where his liberty is on the line with, at most, 30 minutes’ notice. The timing made it impossible for [Vasal] to marshal evidence in his defense, such as evidence of work authorization, information from his employer, testimony or letters of support from friends and family members, and evidence of his living situation. This is a denial of the basic due process rights.”
Locher labeled as “frivolous” claims by the U.S. Attorney’s Office that the immigration judge had to proceed with the hearing or risk missing the seven-day deadline.
“There is no reason why this particular immigration judge had to handle the bond hearing,” Locher wrote. “If her schedule was too crowded to allow it to occur within the seven-day period while still preserving [Vasal’s] rights to counsel and due process, she should have transferred the case to a different immigration judge.”
Locher also questioned the immigration judge’s decision to deny Vasal bond at the conclusion of the hearing, noting that Vasal “has a job, pays his taxes, has a pending asylum case, and has no criminal history other than a traffic violation. It is difficult to see how the immigration judge could have concluded in these circumstances that he is a flight risk.”
Locher ordered that another bond hearing be held within seven days, and that the case be heard by a different judge than the one who handled the matter on Feb. 27.
Third order: ICE can’t ‘whipsaw’ Vasal
The day after that Locher’s decision, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that not all ICE detainees who have been in the United States for months or years are automatically entitled to a bond hearing.
Locher withdrew his order for a new bond hearing, but gave Smith, Vasal’s attorney, an opportunity to argue why a bond hearing was warranted in this specific case.
In response, Smith filed a motion seeking his client’s immediate release. “Human beings are entitled to some due process before they are caged,” Smith told the court. “People who have only committed a traffic violation do not deserve months of confinement.”
On Monday, Locher ruled on the matter and, for the third time, ordered the government to provide Vasal with a bond hearing.
“This case — like thousands of others across the country — emanates from the Trump administration’s decision” to seek mandatory detention of illegal aliens during removal proceedings,” Locher stated in his ruling. He said that stance was at odds with past practice, which was based on “past administrations of both parties, including the first Trump administration, spending dozens of years treating aliens as being entitled to bond hearings.”
As the U.S. attorney representing ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the case, Waterman had argued that the government’s past policy of allowing bond hearings represented a mere “delay” in the current policy of seeking mandatory detention. “The delay by federal immigration authorities here in enforcing the detention statute does not strip them of their authority to do so,” Waterman told the court.
Locher rejected that argument and what he called the government’s efforts “to whipsaw [Vasal] by claiming he has been subject to mandatory detention since the day he entered the United States.”
In his ruling, Locher said the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent decision does not change his conclusion that Vasal is entitled to a bond hearing but does change the reasoning behind it.
He noted that the case before the appeals panel involved an alien who entered the United States in 2016 without encountering immigration officials only to be arrested nine years later, whereas Vasal was stopped by immigration officials within hours of entering the United States and was then released.
“Executive Branch officials simply changed their mind — and upended dozens of years of practice — by deciding that [Vasal] has been subject to mandatory detention since the day he entered the United States,” Locher stated in his ruling. “This court will join the majority of other courts across the country that have concluded that a person has a viable due process claim when the government abruptly changes the rules of the game in this manner … It would be one thing if he had just crossed the border; it is very different when he spent three-plus years in the community under a different set of rules than [the government is] now trying to apply.”
As part of his ruling, Locher declined to simply release Vasal from jail, noting that Vasal had been detained after being ticketed for a traffic violation.
“Although unlikely, it is at least plausible that this infraction, if proven, would shed light on [Vasal’s] dangerousness or risk of flight,” Locher stated. “Thus, the better exercise of discretion is to allow an immigration judge to decide [whether he] has violated the conditions of his release in such a way that makes detention appropriate.”
Clark Kauffman is deputy editor of Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this story first appeared.
