DHS’s Misleading Press Release Smears a U.S. Judge in Rhode Island

On April 30, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published—and still, as of the date of this article’s publication it has not corrected—a deeply misleading press release that maligns a federal judge. The headline reads: “Activist Biden Judge Releases Violent Criminal Illegal Alien Wanted for Murder.” The release quotes Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis commenting, “An activist judge appointed by Joe Biden released this wanted murderer back into American communities. This is yet another example of an activist judge trying to thwart President Trump’s mandate from the American people to remove criminal illegal aliens from our communities.”

The press release’s target, U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose, of the District of Rhode Island, said at a hearing on May 4 that its misleading rhetoric “puts people at risk,” is “dangerous,” and “is a threat to judicial security.”

It is true that the Dominican Republic issued an international warrant to arrest Bryan Rafael Gomez on Jan. 24, 2023, for a “homicide.” It is also true that DuBose ordered Gomez’s release on April 28.

What is missing from the release, however, is any acknowledgment that DuBose never knew of the warrant’s existence. Also missing is the reason the judge did not know: because Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Bolan, who argued against Gomez’s petition for release, never brought that crucial information to her attention. The press release also neglects to mention that the reason Bolan never told her, as he has subsequently explained, is that the DHS’s own Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency instructed him not to.

Bolan is chief of the Rhode Island U.S. attorney’s office’s Civil Division, which he joined in 2023. Bolan’s papers responding to Gomez’s petition for release focused only on the nationwide legal dispute over whether detention for noncitizens who entered the country illegally is mandatory under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2) or discretionary under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a). (See “The Thousands of Lawsuits Challenging Trump’s Mandatory Alien Detention Policy.”)

In a written filing on May 1, and again orally at a hearing held May 4, Bolan told DuBose that he assumed ICE had instructed him not to reveal the warrant’s existence for “a legitimate law enforcement reason.” Bolan further interpreted ICE’s instruction to mean that he could not even reveal the warrant’s existence to DuBose under seal—though he now realizes that this may have been a mistake on his part, he said on May 4. Bolan did not respond to an email seeking comment for this article.

In any case, after apologizing to DuBose, both in writing and at the May 4 hearing, Bolan and other members of his office asked the DHS to take down the misleading press release. On May 5, Bolan reported to DuBose at a second Zoom hearing:

I can tell you that personally I have asked ICE to escalate the issue. I know that our First Assistant U.S. Attorney, as well as our Executive Attorney, both have raised this issue in multiple channels to everyone we are able to contact, with a very firm, very direct, request that the website be taken down because, as your Honor has noted, accurately, the post is inaccurate because it proceeds on the view that this Court had information when it ruled and granted the habeas petition that it lacked.

Those efforts were in vain, however. The irresponsible, misleading, indecent, and potentially dangerous press release still appears on the department’s website.

The story is even stranger than that, though. On April 27, when Bolan filed his response papers to Gomez’s habeas corpus petition seeking release—dutifully omitting mention of Gomez’s homicide warrant at ICE’s insistence—that information was already public. It was public because ICE itself had publicly disseminated it.

On April 7, in a thread of posts on X, ICE announced that it had arrested five foreign fugitives “wanted for murder/homicide.” The agency identified Gomez as one of the five, stating he was “the subject of an Interpol Red Notice” and “wanted by authorities in the Dominican Republic.” The assertions in the thread were reported by Fox News the same day.

Then, on April 16—11 days before Bolan filed his response to Gomez’s habeas corpus petition—ICE issued a press release boasting, again, of having arrested “5 foreign fugitives wanted for murder.” Again, it named each man and, in Gomez’s case, referenced his homicide warrant from the Dominican Republic. (ICE’s April 16 release—unlike its April 7 X posts—did not mention an Interpol Red Notice. At the hearing on May 5, Gomez’s attorney said she had been unable to find evidence of any Interpol notice, and Bolan has never alleged that one exists.)

As for ICE’s April 16 press release, Bolan said at the May 4 hearing that he did not learn of its existence until May 1—four days after he filed his response to Gomez’s habeas petition (omitting mention of the warrant); three days after DuBose ordered Gomez released; and one day after the DHS issued the April 30 release attacking DuBose personally. (At that May 4 hearing, neither the judge nor the attorneys appeared to be yet aware of the April 7 ICE posts or the Fox News article reporting on them. Their existence was first flagged by Gomez’s attorney at the May 5 hearing.) For their part, judges are supposed to make rulings based on the record before them, not to go scouting press releases and social media for information the parties do not put before them.

There are still additional anomalies to this narrative. Despite the DHS’s April 30 personal denunciation of DuBose for releasing an allegedly dangerous man into the community, the government did not file a motion seeking Gomez’s re-detention until four days later, on May 4. At the hearing that day, Bolan explained that, even after the DHS revealed the warrant’s existence in its April 30 press release (for at least the second time, we now know), he felt he had to wait for formal “use authorization” from his own ICE contacts. He did not receive that until May 3, a Sunday. He then moved to re-detain Gomez on May 4. On May 5, after a brief hearing, Judge DuBose granted that motion.

Also on May 5, DuBose referred Bolan’s conduct to the court’s disciplinary committee to review, because of her “ethical” concerns about his “lack of candor” to the court. Two days later, the judges of the District of Rhode Island appointed a special counsel to investigate. Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. chose Niki Kuckes, who is law professor at Roger Williams University and a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, to serve in that role.

Despite making that referral, even DuBose never accused Bolan of acting in bad faith. Nor did she regard him as the heart of the problem. She made clear, on May 4, that the DHS was the bad actor, but she was not sure what, if anything, she could do about that:

[H]ere is a case where the conduct really is misconduct from your client. And I know you have an obligation to represent your client, and I don’t know if there is a mechanism or if there is an avenue for this Court to really other than asking can you take down the erroneous post, but if there is a way that this Court would have the authority to sanction your client for its actions in this case which is really what’s at the heart of this. And I’m not going to ask you to answer that question, but I think it’s something that the Court is going to be looking into.

It’s a quandary that many other judges have grappled with in recent months, as President Trump’s immigration policies overtax the Justice Department’s line attorneys, and as the DHS appears to be either unable or unwilling to provide those attorneys with the information they need to fulfill their obligations. Meanwhile, for more than a year, two successive split panels of majority conservative appellate judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit have thus far blocked U.S. District Judge James Boasberg from investigating a case of possible criminal contempt by high-level DHS and Department of Justice officials.

This article, based on available documents and transcripts of the May 4 and 5 hearings, seeks to provide as full a picture as possible of what happened in the case of Gomez, Bolan, and the misleading DHS press release. Due to default privacy rules governing habeas and immigration cases, however, party filings—as opposed to court orders—in the Gomez case are not available in online federal court records. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bolan did not respond to an email seeking additional documents, and Gomez’s attorney also declined to provide any, citing her schedule.

The Timeline

Bryan Rafael Gomez entered the U.S. without inspection in 2022, according to the DHS. He was “encountered by U.S. Border Patrol near Lukeville, Arizona,” according to the department, and then released for reasons that are not yet apparent from the public record.

On Jan. 24, 2023, the Dominican Republic issued a warrant for the arrest of Gomez for a violation of Article 295 of the Dominican penal code, for “homicide,” and another offense for firearms possession. (According to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit relating to a different Dominican national, Article 295 provides: “He who voluntarily kills another, is guilty of homicide.”)

On April 4, 2026, police in Worcester, Massachusetts, arrested Gomez for “domestic violence,” as Bolan later described it at the May 4 hearing. The charge was “assault and battery,” according to the department. A state judge released Gomez on $500 bond. The Worcester police then turned him over to ICE, pursuant to an ICE hold request, known as a “detainer.”

On April 23, Gomez filed a habeas corpus petition, seeking relief. He was represented by a lawyer named Melanie Shapiro. Judge DuBose ordered the government to respond by April 27, which Bolan did.

The next day, in a text order, DuBose ordered Gomez’s release. The order references the government’s argument that detention was mandatory under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2). She rejected that position, finding that he was entitled to a bond hearing, held before an immigration judge, under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a), citing a previous ruling by the district’s Chief Judge McConnell. (In that ruling, McConnell noted that his decision was consistent with that of “the overwhelming majority of courts across the country,” citing precedents.) “The Government shall set minimal release conditions that will reasonably assure his appearance at the [immigration court] bond hearing,” DuBose wrote, and ordered that such a hearing be provided within 30 days.

ICE then released Gomez. Notwithstanding the homicide warrant, which ICE’s public affairs office certainly knew about, ICE released him with “no conditions, no paper, no ankle monitor, no requirement to report in,” according to the account Shapiro, Gomez’s attorney, later gave at the May 4 hearing. Shapiro said that was “highly unusual,” in her experience.

On April 30, two days after Gomez’s release, the DHS issued its press release: “Activist Biden Judge Releases Violent Criminal Illegal Alien Wanted for Murder.”

“I didn’t know anything about this warrant,” Shapiro recounted at the May 4 hearing, “until ... on Friday morning I woke up to an email from the Boston Globe asking for my comment on the press release.”

More importantly, of course, DuBose knew nothing about it. The day the press release appeared, she issued an order to show cause as to why “respondents”—various DHS and ICE officials up to and including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin—should not be held in contempt:

Notably, the Government’s response failed to include any facts relative to this Petitioner, including facts relevant to an assessment of dangerousness, criminal history or risk of flight. Failing to provide this Court with relevant and material facts threatens public safety and erodes trust in the rule of law. Based on new information available to this Court as described in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) April 30, 2026 press release, the Respondents are ordered to show cause why they should not be held in contempt for failure to notify the Court of facts relevant to Petitioner’s dangerousness and/or criminal history.

She set the hearing for the following Monday, May 4.

On May 1, Bolan filed a two-page memorandum “sincerely” apologizing to DuBose and “the entire Court for the consequences of this lack of disclosure.” He said that ICE had told him he “could not disclose” the existence of the warrant and he had not been aware that ICE had previously disclosed it in the April 16 press release. “At the very least,” he wrote, “the United States should have sought an extension from this Court to file respondents’ habeas response to ensure it had authorization to disclose to the Court the Dominican Republic arrest warrant.”

The May 4 video Zoom hearing began at 3:00 p.m. DuBose began by saying that she was “appreciative” of Bolan’s apology, but still had questions.

“[H]ow is it that an order from a client would supersede any ethical rule for full candor to this Court,” she asked Bolan, “especially in a case where we are dealing with an allegation where an individual poses a danger to the community?”

Bolan reiterated his personal apology but said that ICE had not provided “use authorization” for him to discuss the warrant, though there was “some expectation that that was in progress.” He continued:

My real error, among many perhaps, but certainly I should have had the presence of mind, your Honor, to say to the client and then to the Court, we need more time and we need to escalate this request to get authorization to disclose. ... [M]y sense is that it is not clear to me that this is information we could have disclosed under seal to the Court or not. I’m uncertain, very frankly, about what the answer to that question is, but the bottom line remains that the better course would have been for me to ask for more time.

DuBose then asked about ICE’s April 16 press release, publicly revealing the warrant’s existence. “[T]he only person that’s not told is the one person, meaning this Court, that has to make a determination as to whether or not somebody is going to be released,” she said. She also asked why Bolan could not have informed her of the true situation under seal, continuing:

I know you know and you are a professional, I understand that, we routinely are given warning and addressed by the U.S. Attorney to hold things at bay, that can we sit on something because it may endanger others if this were to be disclosed. We routinely act under seal because we want to make sure that we have full candor. This is not a situation where you had to hold back information and then have that same information be weaponized the very next day as a way to demonstrate that this Court hadn’t done its job.

Bolan responded that he had not known about the April 16 press release until May 1. He expressed regret that he had not performed a Google search, which would have turned it up. He continued:

When we reach out to ICE, ... my understanding is that I’m working with a group of lawyers who have access to information about the habeas petitioner that’s stored in their EARM [ENFORCE Alien Removal Module] database ... [M]y expectation would be is if there were a marrying up of the information that people responsible for media posts, if that were married up to EARM, that information would have been there and … we wouldn’t be in a position to say do we have use authorization from the authorities in the Dominican Republic? It’s already released.

DuBose asked when Bolan learned of the warrant’s existence. Bolan said that ICE agent Brian Sullivan told him about it on April 24—the day after Gomez filed his petition.

Next, DuBose asked if “there were any discussions” about providing that information to her under seal.

“Your Honor, I apologize to you,” Bolan said. “We didn’t and we should have.”

DuBose then noted that the very next day, in a similar matter before the court, Bolan had advised her that the petitioner had been arrested for a crime, and she had held him in custody pending a bond hearing as a result.

Bolan apologized again: “[T]he fact that there was this obvious alternative route, it was a grave error on my part not to have paused, not to have taken more time and not to have been more thoughtful and deliberate.”

The judge asked if the Dominican Republic had commenced extradition proceedings for Gomez. Bolan did not know.

DuBose turned to Shapiro, Gomez’s attorney, and asked whether she knew of extradition proceedings and if she knew Gomez’s whereabouts. Shapiro said Gomez knew nothing about any extradition proceedings. He was currently living at his home in Massachusetts, she added, and she had last been in touch with him just the day before.

DuBose then raised with Bolan whether he’d discussed with the DHS the possibility of taking down “completely [the] erroneous and dangerous [April 30] press release.”

Bolan said he had been “focused solely” on getting her the facts, but “certainly” thought he would be “bringing back to the client [DuBose’s] position.”

DuBose commented:

All right. And I’m not trying to make this political, ... but it’s also very important that the public has the facts. And so as long as this particular post is out there, it’s setting a false narrative that I mentioned again; it puts people at risk, it’s a threat to judicial security but, more importantly, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that we’re doing every day and it’s not helpful. And again, I would argue that it’s actually dangerous.

DuBose then asked Bolan to confirm her understanding that ICE had officially authorized disclosure of the warrant’s existence on April 30. Bolan agreed that, according to a declaration provided by Sullivan, that was correct.

DuBose asked which came first—the authorization or the “inflammatory” press release? Bolan did not know, he said, but would “run that down” for her.

DuBose then returned to the question of Bolan’s candor toward the court. “I have been wracking my brain trying to think of a scenario where an attorney coming before a judge in any court can, at their client’s request, withhold material information.”

Bolan responded:

I understand, your Honor. And it is something I’ve been wrestling with ... I will say that in retrospect, and perhaps we will have to brief it, it is unclear to me, I have not exhaustively looked at it, but my understanding is that this information is in some ways the Dominican Republic’s to choose to disclose or not to disclose. And that may be wrong, I may not have a complete understanding, and that of course is part of one of the problems here and I apologize.

At that point, DuBose turned to yet another puzzling question. ICE agent Sullivan said the “use authorization” had arrived on April 30. Yet ICE had not asked Bolan to file a motion to re-detain Gomez until May 4. Why?

Bolan explained that he, personally, did not learn of the authorization on April 30. “I got confirmation of it yesterday,” he said, which was a Sunday. “I wanted to make sure I understood what ICE had and what it could say and what it could not say and whether we had stated it precisely and accurately. And it’s my fault if it took too long.”

DuBose adjourned the hearing at 3:42 p.m. after calling for another one the next day to consider Bolan’s motion to re-detain Gomez. On May 5, DuBose ordered Gomez back into custody pending a bond hearing before an immigration judge, which she accelerated to take place within seven days, rather than the original 30.

She also formally made a referral to the court’s disciplinary committee, asking it to review Bolan’s conduct in the case. “It’s the candor and the lack of candor to this Court that has to be addressed and it has to be fully investigated so we don’t have anything like this happen again.”

On May 7, as noted above, Chief Judge McConnell appointed a special counsel to look at Bolan’s conduct.

And that’s where matters stand. At the moment, nobody at the DHS or ICE has been forced to answer any questions. DuBose may or may not still be considering what remedies are available as to DHS’s conduct. And the DHS’s misleading press release, unfairly smearing her, is still posted.