A federal judge on Tuesday declined to release a Honduran man who was detained during last week’s ICE raid at a South Burlington home.
There were too many unanswered questions about Christian Humberto Jerez Andrade’s criminal record for District Judge William K. Sessions III to decide whether it would be safe to set him free, the judge said. Instead, Sessions asked a separate immigration court to hold a bond hearing within five business days to consider Jerez Andrade’s request.
The hearing in U.S. District Court had been postponed from Monday because ICE did not have agents available to bring Jerez Andrade to the Burlington courthouse. It was nearly derailed again Tuesday because neither the government nor Jerez Andrade’s attorney could confirm facts about his criminal record.
“I don’t even know what he was convicted of, frankly,” Sessions said. “I don’t know if there’s an active arrest warrant.”
The outcome differed from one a day earlier for Johana Patin Patin, the elder of two Ecuadorian sisters who were also apprehended during the raid. A different federal judge in Vermont granted her immediate release after finding that the government offered no justification for her detention. Her sister, Daysi Camila Patin Patin, has a hearing scheduled for Friday afternoon.
None of the three immigrants arrested last week was the original target of the ICE operation, which agents undertook despite the attempts of hundreds of activists to impede their access to the home. The Mexican man who ICE was pursuing was not inside, federal authorities confirmed the following day.
Attorneys for the three detained immigrants say that ICE violated their civil rights by arresting them in their home.
More: The South Burlington ICE raid explained
The Patin Patin sisters have pending asylum claims, according to their attorneys. Jerez Andrade does not, and, as a result of the raid, he now faces deportation proceedings in Boston immigration court. He came to the U.S. in 2015 to escape unrest in Honduras, his attorney, Nathan Virag, said in court.
Since then, Jerez Andrade has worked in the construction industry in several southern states to support his longtime partner and their child, who is a U.S. citizen, Virag said. He and his nephew, 18-year-old José Jerez, moved to Vermont in the fall, Jerez said during testimony Tuesday. Jerez Andrade has most recently been working on the site of the new Burlington High School building, his attorney told the judge.
The teenage Jerez told the court that his uncle has been his primary father figure throughout his life.
“He tells me, ‘You’ve got to be big in this world.’ So yeah, I look up to him a lot,” Jerez said.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Kaitlin Hazard said that a criminal record check had turned up a conviction for domestic abuse in Louisiana, as well as warrants out of Florida. Hazard could not say whether or not the warrants were active, and said she did not have any knowledge of the underlying cases.
Jerez Andrade took the stand to try to explain. He said the domestic abuse conviction stemmed from a verbal argument between him and his partner in 2020 in which a neighbor called police. He said he pleaded guilty upon the advice of his attorney. Jerez Andrade was unaware of the Florida warrants, but said he once was stopped while driving for not having valid plates, spent a night in jail and paid a fine using money that his then-boss gave him.
“I’m asking for an opportunity, and I will not fail again,” he said through an interpreter. “We’re humans and sometimes we commit mistakes. But we also have moments where we recognize things and learn from that.”
Jerez Andrade’s partner was among those who submitted letters to the court urging his release.
Sessions noted that Jerez Andrade’s petition also raised “fundamental” claims about whether this type of ICE raid had violated his constitutional right to due process and protections from unlawful search and seizure.
More: ICE enforcement action leads to protest, violent clashes outside South Burlington house
If the immigration court declines to release Jerez Andrade at its upcoming hearing, the case would come back to Sessions’ courtroom, he said, for consideration of those potentially far-reaching constitutional questions.
“We’re talking about a major trial,” the judge said.
Dozens of activists had gathered outside the courthouse to support Jerez Andrade’s release. After word of his ongoing imprisonment reached the crowd, they began chanting his name.
