A federal judge acknowledged on Thursday that the government violated his order by deporting a man in immigration detention during his pending court case, but it “serves nobody’s interests” to require the government to return him.

On Feb. 18, Tesfami Chael filed a habeas corpus petition in Colorado’s U.S. District Court to challenge his immigration detention. That same day, the court assigned Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson to the case. As is standard practice, Jackson issued an order blocking the government from removing Chael from Colorado while Jackson resolved the habeas petition.

However, on March 12, Jackson handed down another order commending the government for admitting it had violated his directive.

“The Court appreciates the government’s candor about the mistake that occurred in removing the petitioner from the country during the pendency of his habeas petition despite the Court’s Order,” he wrote, “as well as the fact that it appears to be a one-off mistake and that the government is making efforts to determine how it occurred and improve its systems so that it does (not) reoccur.”

Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee, added that “ordering the government to retrieve the petitioner from Germany and return him to immigration custody in the United States when he was asking the court to release him from detention serves nobody’s interests.”

Consequently, he terminated Chael’s case.

In response to questions from Colorado Politics, multiple Colorado-based immigration attorneys said they could not recall another instance of the government violating a judge’s order in a habeas case in the past year and erroneously deporting someone.

Chael’s attorney, Sarah Vuong, declined to talk about the details of her client’s case, but she, too, was unaware of anything similar happening.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Colorado declined to answer specific questions about the government’s conduct in Chael’s case or who was responsible for his deportation.

Courts elsewhere have found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement violated judicial orders in recent months, with the chief judge of Minnesota’s federal court chronicling at least 96 violations in January alone.

Recently, two of Colorado’s judges wrote that they have personally observed ICE’s compliance with decisions. However, Senior Judge William J. Martínez cautioned that he will “not hesitate to order the immediate release of noncitizens” if he encounters recalcitrance.

Two other judges, Charlotte N. Sweeney and Gordon P. Gallagher, have also instructed ICE to remove various conditions that were not authorized by immigration judges in their decisions to release certain detainees. In a Feb. 6 order, Sweeney suggested ICE was exhibiting “unjustifiable intransigence” by allegedly confiscating a man’s identifying documents after his release.

Earlier this week, Jackson also was called upon in a separate case to decide whether ICE’s requirement that a released man report for a “check-in and case review” amounted to an unlawful condition outside the scope of his order. Jackson concluded the “seemingly routine and limited” requirement was not a violation of any order.

“If ICE imposes more onerous conditions at the check-in appointment or in the future, petitioner may renew his motion,” Jackson wrote.

The case is Chael v. Lyons et al.