A federal judge appointed by President Trump denied a New York City Council staffer’s bid for release from immigration detention Monday, ruling that his pending application for Temporary Protected Status did not shield him from arrest and deportation.
Rafael Andres Rubio Bohorquez, a personnel services data analyst for the City Council, has spent more than two months in ICE custody since agents arrested him at a Bethpage, Long Island immigration office in mid-January. He had gone there for a routine asylum case interview at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office. He has not been free since.
Judge John Cronan of the Southern District of New York sided with the Trump administration Monday, ruling that Bohorquez’s TPS had been effectively withdrawn. “The Court concludes that, as a factual matter, Rubio’s TPS has been withdrawn,” Cronan wrote in his decision denying Bohorquez’s habeas corpus petition.
The ruling cuts against a broader pattern in the Southern District, where many judges have ordered the release of immigrants swept up in the administration’s deportation push, often acting within days of detention. Bohorquez’s assignment to Cronan proved the exception.
The Venezuelan native had held TPS with valid work authorization and submitted renewal paperwork in mid-October, well within the required window. His attorney, Roger Asmar, presented filings showing that application remained pending. The problem: the federal government stopped processing those applications shortly after Trump took office.
Jessica Bansal, an attorney with the National TPS Alliance, which is currently challenging the administration’s attempt to end the Venezuelan TPS designation in court, said the situation facing Bohorquez reflects a much wider crisis. “Everyone’s application is still pending, more or less,” she said. “Many Venezuelans never received a final decision on their pending TPS application.”
Bansal explained that the standard practice for years held that TPS protected applicants from arrest and deportation while their extensions were being reviewed, because processing times routinely stretched to a year while the status itself lasted only 18 months. “TPS would be useless if it didn’t work like that,” she said.
That legal logic did not move Judge Cronan. The Trump administration’s position, which Cronan accepted, treated the attempted termination of the TPS program as sufficient to strip protection from applicants whose paperwork sat unreviewed in a government backlog the government itself created.
The legal battle over Venezuelan TPS is slowly climbing toward the Supreme Court. Lower courts have already ruled the administration’s move to end the designation was illegal, but that has not stopped enforcement in the meantime.
Bohorquez’s case drew sharp condemnation from New York elected officials when it became public in January. A City Council staffer arrested while cooperating with federal immigration authorities sent a clear message about what cooperation now means under this administration.
At a hearing last month, Asmar pointed to the case of Hugo Alejandro Caldera Ferrer, another Venezuelan TPS holder who was arrested by ICE and released about a week after he filed a similar legal challenge. Ferrer attended the hearing in support of Bohorquez. The two men became friends while detained together at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where ICE began housing immigrants last year. “The guy is a really beautiful person,” Ferrer told reporters gathered outside the courthouse.
The contrast between Ferrer’s outcome and Bohorquez’s is not a matter of different facts. It is a matter of which judge received the case. That is the system working exactly as the administration needs it to work, where enough favorable rulings, in enough courts, make deportation easier even when the legal ground underneath it is contested.
Asmar could not be immediately reached for comment following Monday’s ruling. What comes next for Bohorquez, whether an appeal or a continued wait in federal detention while the larger TPS litigation inches forward, remains an open question. What is clear is that a man who worked for New York’s City Council, paid his taxes, filed his paperwork on time, and showed up for his immigration interview, has now been locked up for more than ten weeks because a judge accepted the government’s argument that a backlog the government created somehow extinguished his rights.
