A federal judge ordered a man’s immediate release from immigration detention on Thursday after finding an immigration judge disregarded his prior orders requiring a bond hearing.

For the past year, Colorado’s federal district court has faced a flood of “habeas corpus” petitions from those in immigration detention. The most common allegation is that the government is improperly denying bond hearings to people who are eligible by law.

Colorado’s judges, like the vast majority of their peers nationwide, have agreed with that argument and have issued a high volume of orders requiring immigration judges to hold hearings to decide if it is appropriate to release someone from custody, while their immigration proceedings unfold.

On March 10, U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter issued one such order in the case of Jose Millan Olivas. The government conceded that Neureiter’s reasoning in prior cases would also lead him to the same result for Olivas. Neureiter noted that, if no bond hearing happened within a week, the government must release Olivas.

He quickly issued a follow-up order clarifying that, at the bond hearing, the government would “bear the burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that Petitioner’s continued detention is justified due to dangerousness or flight risk.”

On March 19, two days after Olivas received a bond hearing, his attorney returned to Neureiter to alert him to a problem. Neureiter then held a hearing on April 2 and issued an order that day, finding that an unnamed immigration judge had disobeyed his instructions.

“Specifically, at the March 17, 2026, bonding hearing, the Immigration Judge and the counsel for the United States appeared to be operating under the misapprehension that orders from this Court,” he wrote, “were advisory or mere recommendations as opposed to enforceable and binding.”

Further, the immigration judge, who is an executive branch employee, “appeared not to have read the Court’s Orders. If she had, she would have known that Respondents bore the burden of proof at the bond hearing,” Neureiter wrote.

As a result, Neureiter concluded the hearing that Olivas received was inadequate. He also believed the government did not prove, based on the evidence presented, that Olivas should remain in custody.

“The minimal effort by the government attorney to establish by ‘clear and convincing’ evidence that Petitioner was either a danger or a flight risk, and the IJ’s (unprompted) raising of issues that the government had the burden to show is further evidence that Petitioner did not receive the requisite bond hearing under the conditions that were ordered,” Neureiter wrote.

He directed the government to release Olivas immediately.

Neither the U.S. Attorney’s Office nor Olivas’ lawyer responded to Colorado Politics’ questions about the identity of the immigration judge who violated Neureiter’s orders.

The case is Olivas v. Baltazar et al.