U.S. District Judge Robert Huie of the southern district of California ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release Adeyemi Olufowora, an undocumented Nigerian immigrant, who had been held in an ICE facility since September 2025.

Mr Olufowora entered the U.S. in 2013 through the El Paso port of entry in Texas without any official documentation. He was immediately handed over to immigration authorities, who detained him and initiated deportation proceedings against him.

An immigration judge approved Mr Olufowora’s removal from the U.S., a decision the Nigerian man did not appeal.

But the absence of Mr Olufowora’s immigration documents stalled his deportation, given that “ICE was unable to obtain a travel document for his return to Nigeria”.

ICE was running thin on time, in that the agency only had a 90-day deportation window from the date of the judge’s removal order to expel him

Having spent six months in ICE custody still without any documentation, Mr Olufowora was released on an order of supervision in September 2013.

The supervised release ran smoothly for more than a decade until September 2025, when ICE moved to enforce the 2013 pending deportation order.

Mr Olufowora challenged it, arguing that ICE violated its own regulations by revoking his supervised release without prior notice. He accused ICE of not following due process in their attempt to deport him.

ICE, under the Department of Homeland Security, admitted to the court that officers did not notify the Nigerian man of a revocation of his supervised release, a document he was entitled to by law. But ICE maintained the omission was not tantamount to “deprivation of the process”.

“Respondents, in candour, concede that petitioner was not provided written notice of the reasons for the revocation of his release, or an informal interview allowing petitioner to respond to those reasons,” Mr Huie stated in his ruling.

Having examined the arguments of both parties, the judge chided the defendants, including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the department itself.

“Government agencies are required to follow their own regulations,” the district judge wrote in his ruling on February 13.

The judge ordered DHS to “release petitioner Adeyemi Olufowara from custody within one business day of the date of this order, subject to the terms of his previous order of supervision”.