(IOWA CAPITAL DISPATCH) – A federal judge has ordered the Muscatine County Jail to release an ICE detainee who had been incarcerated for almost a year after a judge ruled in his favor on an asylum request. The Iowa Capital Dispatch says court records indicate 36-year-old Jose Yugar-Cruz entered the United States in July 2024 after fleeing his home country of Bolivia. In court filings, Yugar-Cruz alleged that while living in Bolivia, he operated a small business and had “refused to facilitate the drug trade by police officials” who then detained him and tortured him.

In the court filings, Yugar-Cruz said he fled to Mexico, entered the United States on foot at the Arizona border, and then “sought out and surrendered” himself to federal immigration officials. He was then taken into custody and jailed, after which he applied for asylum based on the threat of persecution in Bolivia.

In December 2024, a federal immigration judge held a hearing on Yugar-Cruz’s asylum request. According to a lawsuit Yugar-Cruz filed four weeks ago against Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and various Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, the judge ruled in January 2025 that the U.S. government could not send Yugar-Cruz back to Bolivia due to the ongoing threat of torture. The judge granted Yugar-Cruz “withholding-of-removal relief” — a form of protection for individuals who face persecution if returned to their home country. It prevents the U.S. government from deporting an individual to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened.

In his lawsuit, Yugar-Cruz asserted the government never appealed the immigration judge’s ruling and so he “expected that he would soon be released from detention and allowed to start his life in the United States.” In February 2025, however, Yugar-Cruz was still being held in the Freeborn County Adult Detention Center in Albert Lea, Minn. While there, the lawsuit claimed, he spoke to ICE officials who first indicated he’d be released in “15 days or so,” but later informed him they would continue to hold him while looking for some third-party country to which he could be deported.

The lawsuit alleged ICE officials proposed that Yugar-Cruz be deported to Argentina, Chile or Paraguay, all of which border Bolivia, but Yugar-Cruz objected, noting that Bolivians, including the police, can easily travel to those countries without a passport. Mexico was proposed as an alternative, but Yugar-Cruz expressed concern officials there would simply deport him to Bolivia. On Dec. 3, 2025, Yugar-Cruz was transferred from the Albert Lea jail to the Muscatine County Jail in Iowa.

Nine days later, Yugar-Cruz’s attorney sued the Muscatine County jail administrator, as well as Noem and other Homeland Security officials, alleging they were violating federal law by continuing to detain Yugar-Cruz 11 months after the immigration judge had ruled in his favor. As part of that lawsuit, Yugar-Cruz’s attorney noted the Trump administration had adopted a practice of deporting people to third-party countries with no guarantee those individuals wouldn’t immediately be sent to their home country, where they faced persecution or torture.

A federal judge in the District of Columbia has ruled the practice amounts to a “widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.” Yugar-Cruz has no criminal record, according to his attorney’s court filings. His lawsuit alleged violations of his due process rights and the Immigration Nationality Act, and sought his immediate release from the Muscatine County Jail.

Recently, after the U.S. Department of Justice acknowledged the federal government had been attempting, without success, to find a third-party country to accept Yugar-Cruz, District Court Judge Stephen H. Locher ruled in Yugar-Cruz’s favor. Locher ordered the Muscatine County Jail to work with ICE officials in securing Yugar-Cruz’s immediate release and, on Jan. 7, 2026, ICE officials confirmed for the court that Yugar-Cruz had been discharged from the county jail.

His release remains subject to “reasonable conditions of supervision” by ICE, according to Locher’s order.