Immigration Judge Calls to Deport Teen Boy… Who’s Been Dead for More Than a Year

We’ve long known qualified minds have no place in the Trump administration, a regime that’s fired more than 100 immigration judges in the last 18 months, only to replace them with its agenda-fulfilling cronies—such as a woman who once claimed it her juridical duty to fight “exclusively for the rights of men.” But equally, you can imagine the judges that were spared the axe also suck—albeit in their own ways. 

One of these judges includes the North Carolina-based Amy Lee, who most recently showed off her inability to duly perform her job in May, when she ordered for the deportation of Levi Mendez-Maldonado—who’s been dead for more than a year, a fact that Lee knew, but apparently refused to acknowledge.

Mendez-Maldonado, a Honduras national who arrived as a 17-year-old accompanied minor in the country in 2022, was killed in a shooting two years later (per records from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department), and was meant to appear before Lee on May 21. But when his lawyer, Becca O’Neill, appeared on his behalf, and showed the judge the documents from the CMPD, she recounted that the courts reacted with little to no emotion. Which is probably because they weren’t really listening.

“The whole thing probably took maybe five minutes,” she told the Guardian. “The attorney acted like we were talking about the weather. The judge didn’t take a moment to reorient herself after hearing he was dead.” 

The details of Mendez-Maldonado’s case came to light on Wednesday, when the Guardian obtained a copy of the court documents calling for the teen’s deportation—an issue that did not at all acknowledge the news of his death, but instead cited his “failure to appear.” “Despite the written notification provided, respondent failed to appear at the hearing,” the judge’s order read. “No exceptional circumstances were shown.” 

I mean, in less authoritarian times, it’s likely that death would account for an exceptional circumstances—but this is a deportation-happy administration that’s holding more than 60,000 individuals in ICE detention, and that claims to have deported nearly half a million people. Part of this has entailed ramping up its deportation processes—a strategy that’s yielded cruel and horrible results.

And Lee herself is a judge whose track record aligns closely with the administration’s agenda, and who also in the last five years denied nearly 90% of her 550 asylum cases. 

Speaking to the Guardian, O’Neill said Lee’s move to deport the murdered teen operates as another instance of the “banality of evil” that seems to reign across Trump’s deportation campaign. “All of this is so normalized and bizarre,” she said. “Just a boilerplate order: he didn’t come to court, he didn’t demonstrate good cause. Well, he’s dead. And you know that because you saw a government website saying that he’s dead.”