Kevin Ramirez Mancia, U-Visa Petitioner Held Four Months in Freeborn County Jail, Wins Federal Habeas Release

Named witness. Kevin Jose Ramirez Mancia’s U-visa eligibility traces to a 2016 attack in Minneapolis: a classmate who mistook him waving his hands while singing at his desk for a taunt pulled a knife and pointed it at his neck. (“I thought he was going to stab me,” Ramirez Mancia told the Minnesota Reformer.) In 2023, based on his status as a victim of second-degree assault and threats of violence, he applied for a U visa and received a work permit and USCIS deferred action — formal protection from deportation while the petition was pending.

On April 4, 2026, police pulled Ramirez Mancia over and arrested him on suspicion of driving under the influence of cannabis. As he waited for his release paperwork, an ICE officer told him he was being taken into immigration custody instead. He spent exactly four months in Freeborn County Jail — a county facility that holds immigrants under contract with ICE.

The federal case. Ramirez Mancia filed a 28 U.S.C. § 2241 habeas corpus petition (Ramirez Mancia v. Blanche, 0:26-cv-03122, D. Minn., filed 2026-06-26) naming Attorney General Pam Bondi’s successor at DOJ leadership, ICE officials, and detention officials as respondents. The court initially enjoined the government from transferring or removing him from Minnesota pending resolution and ordered his return if already removed. Magistrate Judge John F. Docherty issued a Report and Recommendation on 2026-07-17; District Judge Katherine M. Menendez accepted it and granted the writ on 2026-08-03, ordering Ramirez Mancia’s immediate release. He was released and, per the Minnesota Reformer, “will remain free while he appeals his deportation order.”

Why this case matters structurally. This is the sharpest available instance of the U-visa mechanism working as designed and then being overridden by arrest: a documented crime victim, formally recognized by USCIS with deferred-action protection based on that victimhood, taken into ICE custody off the back of an unrelated traffic stop and held four months before a federal court intervened. It independently corroborates, via primary court docket rather than news narrative alone, the pattern Minnesota Reformer’s habeas-petition review documented at scale — see 2026-08-07–ice-arrests-75-uvisa-crime-victims-operation-metro-surge. It also demonstrates that the 2026-05-20 ICWC v. Noem nationwide class injunction (2026-05-20–icwc-v-noem-preliminary-injunction-u-visa-arrest-protections) did not automatically resolve individual detentions arising under the same rescinded policy — Ramirez Mancia’s own habeas case, filed five weeks after that injunction, still required separate individual litigation and ran another five weeks to a release order.

Dignity note. Ramirez Mancia is named on the public federal docket and in on-record Minnesota Reformer reporting; this entry uses his full name accordingly. A second individual in the same Reformer article — referred to only as “Rosa,” at her own request, to protect her from government retribution — is NOT named here; any future KB use of her account must preserve that anonymity choice rather than attempt to identify her further.