Jose Eliezer Martinez-Andino wasn't anywhere near his adopted hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, when his ordeal began. The mechanic, who had moved to the Triangle to live with relatives in the summer of 2025, was several states into a cross-country drive to Seattle when Border Patrol agents stopped the car he was riding in, on March 18, 2026, in Montana. Officers said the vehicle carried a forged license plate, according to La Prensa.
By that point, Martinez-Andino had already spent six years building a legal foothold in the U.S. He crossed into Texas alone at 14, in 2020, and three years later a judge granted him Special Immigrant Juvenile Status: humanitarian protection meant for young people whose parent abused, neglected, or abandoned them, available only to those under 21, according to WUNC. Along with that status came deferred action and a work permit. He'd also since become the father of a U.S.-citizen daughter, now three years old.
Pressured to Sign, Then Cut Off From Counsel
Within roughly a day of his arrest, Martinez-Andino put his signature on a voluntary-departure form. He later described the decision as something closer to a trap than a choice. "It was a truly horrible experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone," he told WUNC in Spanish, adding that fear of a long detention had pushed him to sign, and that he changed his mind almost as fast once he weighed the poverty and violence waiting for him back home.
That change of heart, his legal team argued, should have counted. The same voluntary-departure paperwork he signed, Form I-826, spells out that a person can call off their exit and take the matter to immigration court instead, right up until the moment they actually leave. Martinez-Andino says he tried to invoke exactly that right, repeatedly, while shuttled between detention facilities spread across Montana and Arizona, per La Prensa.
Meanwhile, attorney Alison Chan filed notice that she was representing him on March 31 — and then, she told the court, spent days unable to get ICE or Customs and Border Protection to say where he was being held. Immigration officers put him on a plane bound for Honduras on April 10, and he landed in his birth city of Tela, on the Caribbean coast, according WUNC.
The government has told a different story. A DHS spokesperson said Martinez-Andino received full due process, noting he'd crossed the border illegally in 2020 and that an earlier case against him had been closed, without a decision on the merits, back in July 2023, Newsweek reported. Asked directly about the claim that his lawyer couldn't reach him, the spokesperson was unequivocal, calling the accusation "FALSE."
A Judge Calls the Removal Something That "Boggles the Mind"
Judge Beryl Howell, of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., wasn't persuaded. In a temporary order issued in late June, she directed DHS to work toward bringing him back, writing that the government had removed him "in a manner that boggles the mind," according to ABC News. The government offered no sworn statements from any officer to counter his version of events, and Howell found he'd likely gone more than ten days without any contact with his own lawyer while in custody, per ABC News's account of the ruling.
A month later, after both sides submitted fuller arguments, Howell issued a 46-page preliminary injunction reinforcing that order and rejecting the government's claim that courts had no authority to demand his return, Newsweek reported. Her reasoning rested substantially on a 2025 Supreme Court order in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man mistakenly sent to a Salvadoran prison, which held that courts can compel federal agencies to bring back people who were improperly deported. Howell declined to set a firm deadline, instead ordering DHS to file status updates on its efforts every 48 hours.
Home, But Straight Into Custody
Martinez-Andino boarded a flight out of San Pedro Sula's airport on August 5. His destination wasn't Raleigh-Durham but Harlingen, Texas, according to WUNC. CBP confirmed to La Prensa that he'd returned under judicial order and remained in the agency's custody, and his attorney told WUNC he was relieved just to have his feet on American ground again.
DHS has since filed a new removal case against Martinez-Andino through standard immigration-court proceedings rather than the accelerated voluntary-departure track used the first time. His attorney, Ayla Blumenthal, told La Prensa that the switch matters, since it gives him a chance to contest deportation in front of a judge before it happens. His legal team is seeking a bond hearing and is prepared to file a habeas corpus petition if that fails; if he's released, he may be able to pursue permanent residency through an already-approved I-360 petition tied to his juvenile status.
That bond hearing may be harder to win than it would have been a few months ago. A divided Fifth Circuit panel ruled in early July that people held in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi are entitled to individualized custody hearings after 90 days in detention — but the full appeals court voted to rehear the case less than two weeks later, wiping out that ruling and reinstating mandatory, no-bond detention for now, per reporting on the related Fifth Circuit bond-hearing rulings. The en banc rehearing isn't scheduled until September, leaving Martinez-Andino's custody status — and that of many other detained immigrants in the region — in limbo.
A Narrow Path, But a Real One
Court-ordered returns like this remain unusual. Advocates say Martinez-Andino is one of well over a hundred Special Immigrant Juvenile Status recipients removed from the country since the current immigration crackdown began. In 2025 alone, DHS told a U.S. senator's office, agents took 265 SIJS holders into custody, and 132 of them were ultimately removed, per WUNC. One advocacy group called the case a hopeful sign for a population it says is being targeted with growing frequency.
For immigration lawyers elsewhere — in South Florida, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York — Martinez-Andino's case offers a working playbook rather than a guarantee: a documented attempt to revoke a signed departure agreement, a paper trail showing blocked attorney access, and a fast-moving federal lawsuit can occasionally undo a deportation that's already happened. Whether it also gets him back to his daughter and his old life in Raleigh now rests with a Texas courtroom he can't yet leave.
