A Woodbury County jail inmate is suing the federal government, alleging she’s being unlawfully detained by U.S Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and faces a year of confinement while being denied her due process rights.
The case is one of hundreds of similar lawsuits filed around that nation against ICE, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Rosaura Genchi Garcia alleges the federal government is “attempting to circumvent immigration law and rewrite the Immigration and Nationality Act” by detaining her and others and denying them due process by refusing to let them appear in court and argue for their release on bond while their immigration cases are pending.
The Trump administration’s position is that contrary to decades of past precedent, longstanding federal law requires mandatory detention without the possibility of release on bond for all individuals who are suspected of unauthorized entry to the United States.
Past precedent allows bond for established residents
In the past, mandatory detention was limited to individuals apprehended while illegally attempting to enter the country. Individuals who were taken into custody after being in the United States for months, years or decades, were normally given the opportunity to argue for their release on bond while their immigration cases were pending.
As with other detainees, Garcia is seeking relief from a federal judge in U.S. District Court, arguing that the bond-hearing decisions made by immigration judges in the separate legal arena of Immigration Court are unconstitutional.
While virtually every district court judge considering such cases has sided with the detainees in finding that they are entitled to a bond hearing, ICE and Homeland Security have maintained their stance that, under the Trump administration’s new interpretation of federal law, detention is mandatory. As a result, hundreds of Immigration Court cases have stalled while the individual detainees hire lawyers to file lawsuits on their behalf in U.S. District Court.
In their response to Garcia’s lawsuit, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security have argued that mandatory detention is lawful and that the U.S. Supreme Court “has long recognized Congress’s broad power and immunity from judicial control to expel aliens from the country and to detain them while doing so.”
According to court records, Garcia came to the United States from Mexico in 2004 and was arrested in June 2025 for working under an alias. In September 2025, after completing her sentence in that case, Garcia was detained by ICE and held for potential deportation.
In early October, she requested a bond hearing but it was denied by an immigration court judge, who cited the legal theory that he lacked jurisdiction to even consider such a request.
Garcia’s attorneys argue the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and others are ignoring binding federal regulations, past court rulings and the plain language of the law, all in an effort to “further a political agenda by the current presidential administration.”
In their lawsuit, they note that the deportation decisions rendered by immigration judges are not final unless the individual being detained chooses not to file an appeal. As such, it may be at least a year before Garcia’s case reaches a final decision, which means she is likely to be jailed for at least another 12 months, they say.
They point out that processing time in some immigration cases ranges from 14 months to 48 months, and the increasing number of appeals filed as a result of the Trump administration’s stance is creating a backlog of cases at the Board of Immigration Appeals.
In their petition to district court, lawyers for Garcia argue that while the actions of the Trump administration “will not hold up in Federal Appeals Court, it will take time to get decisions from every single circuit court — and in the meantime the government is stripping immigrants of their constitutional rights.”
Case was transferred from Nebraska
In addition to DHS, ICE and the DOJ, Garcia’s lawsuit names as defendants Greg London, the sheriff in Sarpy County, Nebraska; Sarpy County Jail Director Jo Martin; U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
The Sarpy County officials are named as defendants in the case because, when the lawsuit was initially filed several weeks ago, Garcia was being held in the Sarpy County Jail. Since then, Garcia has been transferred to Iowa’s Woodbury County Jail, which has resulted in the lawsuit being transferred from U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska to U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa.
Find this story at Iowa Capital Dispatch, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions:kobradovich@iowacapitaldispatch.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa inmate sues feds for holding her without bond in immigration case
Reporting by Clark Kauffman, Iowa Capital Dispatch / Des Moines Register
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