A federal judge has intervened in the case of an Iowa man jailed by ICE after living in the United States for 10 years since the age of 11.
Alvaro Anastacio Garcia Tevalan of Clarion recently filed a federal lawsuit against Polk County Chief Jail Administrator Cory Williams, Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement David Venturella, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche. Tevalan’s lawsuit challenged the legality of his current detention by ICE, seeking either his immediate release or a court hearing at which he could argue for temporary release on bond.
Court records show that Tevalan, who is a citizen of Guatemala, entered the United States without authorization in November 2016 at the age of 11. He was apprehended by Border Patrol agents who processed him as a minor unaccompanied by an adult and immediately placed him with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Within a few weeks, the government released him to his mother’s custody in Clarion, Iowa.
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Now 20 years old, Tevalan has lived in the United States for almost 10 years and has a child who is a United States citizen. Court records indicate he has never violated the terms of his release in 2016.
On April 29, 2026, Tevalan was arrested in Wright County on a charge of domestic-abuse assault. Police alleged he was involved in an altercation with the female victim, who was left with scratches or bruises on her arms and shoulders.
An ICE officer then lodged a detainer against Tevalan, and ICE took custody of him on May 1, 2026, and he has allegedly remained in jail since that time. The domestic abuse charge remains pending, with a Wright County judge having entered a June 18 warrant for Tevalan’s arrest for failing to appear for a trial hearing in the case. Court records indicate that due to the ICE detainer, Tevalan was in the Polk County Jail at that time of the planned hearing.
Recently, Stephanie Rose, chief judge for the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Iowa, took up Tevalan’s lawsuit seeking his immediate release or a bond hearing. The question before the court, Rose ruled, was “whether the government may re-detain, without process, a noncitizen it allowed to live at liberty in the country for nearly a decade. It may not.”
While the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has held that under federal law noncitizens who enter the country without authorization and are later arrested are subjected to mandatory detention, Rose said that decision “does not end the matter” in Tevalan’s case, where constitutional rights are at play.
Rose concluded that the government, having released Tevalan and allowed him to live at liberty for a decade, cannot now re-detain him without due process.
“When the government releases a noncitizen into the country and allows him to remain, it does more than perform an administrative gesture,” Rose ruled. “It permits him to order his life around his continued liberty, and over time that reliance ripens into an interest the due-process clause protects. A person permitted to remain at liberty receives an implicit promise that their liberty will be revoked only if they fail to live up to the conditions of release.”
The due process protections of the Constitution are guaranteed to all persons within the United States, including Tevalan, Rose stated.
“He has lived in the United States for nearly a decade and raised a citizen child,” Rose stated. “For all those years the government left him at liberty, and until his recent arrest, it alleged no breach of the terms of his release … For a decade the government allowed (Tevalan) to live in the community, and in all that time it never alleged he broke a term of his release.”
Rose also noted that whether Tevalan’s April 2026 arrest makes him ineligible for release on bond is a question for an immigration judge to decide at a bond hearing, which Rose ordered while declining Tevalan’s request for immediate release.
