Immigration Bond After a DUI Arrest and ICE Detention

Attorney Answer

Possibly, yes — most people held by ICE can ask an immigration judge for a bond. But understand this first: posting bail in the criminal DUI case will not get him out of ICE custody. These are two separate systems with separate judges, separate bonds, and separate paperwork.

The general authority is 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a). Pending a decision on removal, the Attorney General may arrest and detain a noncitizen and may, in his discretion, release the person on bond of at least $1,500 or on conditional parole. A person who is detained can seek a custody redetermination — in plain terms, a bond hearing — before an immigration judge. That is the request your stepdad's lawyer would make.

The exception is 8 U.S.C. § 1226(c), which requires mandatory detention, with no eligibility for a § 1226(a) bond hearing, for noncitizens who are inadmissible or deportable by reason of having committed certain enumerated offenses — including aggravated felonies, controlled-substance offenses, and certain crimes involving moral turpitude — and who are released from criminal custody. A simple DUI conviction is not itself one of the enumerated triggering categories. But this is fact-dependent, and it does not turn on the new arrest alone: other convictions already in his record can put him inside § 1226(c) even if the DUI would not. Aggravated variants of DUI and DUI combined with other offenses can also change the analysis. Nobody can tell you he is bond-eligible without seeing his complete criminal and immigration history.

The two cases also affect each other. How the DUI is resolved in criminal court — what he pleads to, if anything, and what sentence is imposed — can change his immigration exposure permanently, and a criminal outcome that looks like a good deal can be an immigration disaster. That is why the criminal defense lawyer and the immigration lawyer need to be talking to each other before anything is resolved.

What you can do

1. Locate him. Use ICE's online detainee locator, which needs either his alien registration number (A-number) or his full name, date of birth and country of birth. Write the A-number down; every later step needs it. 2. Get an immigration attorney involved now and ask them to request a bond hearing — a custody redetermination — before the immigration judge under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a). 3. Collect his full criminal history from every state, including old cases and anything that was dismissed or diverted. The § 1226(c) question is answered by that history, not by the current arrest. 4. Start building the bond packet: proof of how long he has lived here, family ties, employment records, tax returns, lease or mortgage, letters from people who know him, and anything showing he is neither a flight risk nor a danger. 5. Keep the criminal DUI case moving with its own lawyer, and make sure that lawyer knows he is in ICE custody before agreeing to any resolution. 6. Tell him not to sign anything he is handed in detention — particularly anything about voluntary departure or agreeing to a removal order — until his immigration lawyer has read it.

⏱ Time limits apply. A Kansas DUI arrest usually starts a driver's-license case that runs on a short clock, entirely separately from both the criminal case and the immigration case, and that clock does not pause because he is in ICE custody. If any notice about his license was handed to him at the time of arrest or mailed to his home, find it now — the window to request that hearing is typically days, and it depends on exactly what he was served with.