A federal judge declined to take action against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Thursday after hearing that a pattern of alleged lawbreaking amounted to mistakes and a misunderstanding of the government’s position in court.

For nearly a year, Colorado’s U.S. 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 largely agreed with that argument, and the Denver-based federal appeals court handed down a binding interpretation of the law in June confirming that view.

Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Scott T. Varholak, in releasing three habeas petitioners in recent weeks, directed the government to appear for a Sept. 10 hearing to address ICE’s “apparent repeated violation of the law.”

“This case presents one in a series of cases in which (the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) appears to have simply ignored the law and detained an individual in violation of the law. The United States has not — and apparently cannot — defend that decision,” Varholak wrote in one order, referring to the now-standard practice of Colorado’s U.S. Attorney’s Office to not argue in opposition to wrongful detention claims.

However, after the government submitted additional materials, Varholak acknowledged at the hearing that the evidence painted a different picture of ICE’s actions at the time of arrest.

“My concern when I set this hearing was that I had an undisputed record at that time because the government had not filed a responsive brief (disputing) that each of these three individuals were arrested without a warrant existing, and without promptly thereafter obtaining a warrant,” Varholak said. “It appears that, in each of these cases, the reality is that warrants were either existing beforehand or obtained shortly thereafter. There may be (procedural) issues. But it’s not the blatant violation of the law that had concerned me.”

Each of the three habeas cases that Varholak handled had raised allegations of an unlawful warrantless arrest under slightly different circumstances.

In one case, a man from the Congo who had been living in Denver was arrested during a scheduled immigration check-in. ICE obtained an administrative warrant at 9:02 a.m., and the arrest form indicated the arrest happened three minutes later.

In the second case, a citizen of Venezuela who lived in Boulder was arrested after ICE agents surveilled him and chased him from his vehicle.

In the third case, ICE apprehended a native of Honduras in Florida during a roadside stop, and held him in custody in Aurora.

For all three instances, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Soler provided the standard response that the government was “not submitting a brief in opposition to the Petition detailing the facts and circumstances of this case.”

Varholak, in turn, interpreted the government to not be contesting the allegations of unlawful, warrantless arrest across the cases.

Leading up to the hearing, ICE lawyer and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Anh Weinberg provided documentation around the circumstances of each arrest. She acknowledged that, in the case of the petitioner from Florida, a warrant was issued several days after the man’s arrest.

While the government was not arguing that the later-issued warrant necessarily rendered the initial arrest lawful, “the fuller record does not support treating Petitioner’s entire period of pre-habeas custody as one in which DHS simply proceeded indefinitely without issuing a warrant, making a custody determination, or providing access to administrative custody review,” wrote Weinberg.

As for the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s practice of declining to argue in opposition to petitions for bond hearings, that “litigation choice” did not establish that ICE unlawfully arrested the petitioners without warrants, she added.

Attorneys for the petitioners were also present at the hearing, where they disputed some aspects of how ICE handled their clients’ arrests and the procurement of warrants. However, Varholak said the new information alleviated his concerns about “what appeared to be lawless action.”

“I don’t know that there’s anything further, as a result, that needs to be done in these. I have ordered all three of these petitioners to be released, and it appears that that has happened,” he said. “It’s one thing to make a mistake. We’re all human. We all make mistakes. What I was seeing in the course of a day and a half … on the record before me at that time, was blatant violations of the law. It does not appear that is, in fact, what occurred here.”

Varholak added that he took no issue with the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s decision to generally abstain from arguing against bond hearings.

“If you don’t believe you can justify continued detention, he said, “you have an ethical obligation not to argue for continued detention.”

Separately, U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter is considering whether to sanction ICE for rearresting a man days after an immigration judge released him on bond. Weinberg has similarly provided Neureiter with additional information about the circumstances of the man’s arrest and has argued that sanctioning the government would be improper. Neureiter has not yet issued a decision.