A Boston federal judge yesterday ordered the immediate release of Dong Van Nguyen, a Vietnamese refuge who has lived in Dorchester since the 1980s and who has been held by ICE since complying with a required visit to its Burlington office/detention center on May 21.
In his ruling, released late yesterday afternoon, US District Court Judge Myong Joun wrote: “Based on ICE’s violations of its own regulations, I conclude that Mr. Nguyen’s detention is unlawful and that his release is appropriate.”
He also found: “Respondents [ICE, Homeland Security and the Justice Department] do not allege that Mr. Nguyen has violated his [ICE order of supervision] conditions of release set over ten years ago. They also do not allege that he is a flight risk.”
The ruling does not mean that Nguyen, who has state and federal drug convictions on his record – although none since 2014 – will not ultimately be deported to a country he has not been in for more that four decades. However, he will remain free until and unless Vietnam says it is actually willing to take him back, Joun ruled.
Nguyen had earlier been held by ICE for three years, after he pleaded guilt in 1994 to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and then finished a 63-month prison sentence. But ICE eventually released him because even after Vietnam and the US established diplomatic relations in 1995, Vietnam refused to let the US deport any of its former citizens back to their native country.
Since then, he has been on an “order of supervision” that requires him to periodically check in with ICE on a yearly basis, virtually until March of this year, when he was ordered to physically report to ICE in Burlington, first on April 30, and then again May 21, when he was put in a holding are there until being shipped to Plymouth, home of the only jail in the state that still holds ICE detainees.
The two countries eventually reached a deal on repatriation of people born in Vietnam who moved to America, but only after 1995. In 2020, Homeland Security and its Vietnamese equivalent signed a “memorandum of understanding” related to people, like Nguyen, who came here before 1995, but the document is not a treaty and ICE disregarded its own regulations in detaining Nguyen because it had yet to receive any assurances from Vietnam that it would take him back, Joun wrote, adding that all ICE could tell him was that it had made Nguyen ask his former homeland to take him back.
“On the record before me, it is only Mr. Nguyen who has requested a travel document to Vietnam. I have no clear information as to whether or when Mr. Nguyen’s request was submitted to Vietnam, whether Vietnam has even acknowledged receipt of the request or otherwise responded to Mr. Nguyen’s request, or the anticipated wait time for a response from Vietnam. On this record, Respondents cannot make the showing that circumstances have changed such that there is a significant likelihood that Mr. Nguyen will be removed to Vietnam in the reasonably foreseeable future pursuant to [the federal regulation requiring a determination somebody can actually be sent somewhere].”
He added this meant that ICE’s assertion it could throw Nguyen into a lockup before putting him on a plane to Vietnam because of “changed circumstances” – the 2020 agreement – was part of that violation of its own regulations:
“At the June 17, 2025, hearing, I noted that Respondents’ assertions were conclusory; there was nothing in the Notice of Revocation [of Nguyen’s right to stay in the US] or in the record – no statistics or supporting facts – identifying said repatriation agreement and showing that ICE had started to remove pre-1995 Vietnamese refugees, like Mr. Nguyen, to Vietnam. In other words, Respondents did not identify any facts to support that ICE re-detained Mr. Nguyen based on changed circumstances that would show his removal to be significantly likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
Joun wrote:
“Taken together, ICE’s individualized determination to re-detain Mr. Nguyen is not in compliance with [that regulation]. And “ICE, like any agency, has the duty to follow its own federal regulations.” Rombot v. Souza, 296 F. Supp. 3d 383, 388 (D. Mass. 2017) (cleaned up). As here, “where an immigration regulation is promulgated to protect a fundamental right derived from the Constitution or a federal statute . . . and [ICE] fails to adhere to it, the challenged [action] is invalid.”
