But for the nearly three years that his request has remained under consideration, Kouadio, 43, has been detained by U.S. authorities, first in Texas and later in New Jersey. In August, he petitioned a court for help.
On Thursday, a federal judge in Manhattan said the government had violated Kouadio’s rights.
“This nation prides itself on its humanity and openness with which it treats those who seek refuge at its gates,” the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of U.S. District Court, wrote. “By contrast, the autocracies of the world have been marked by harsh regimes of exclusion and detention. Our notions of due process nourish the former spirit and brace us against the latter.”
Detaining Kouadio for 34 months without a bail hearing violated his due process rights as an nonresident immigrant arriving at the border, “limited as those rights are,” the judge said in a ruling some legal experts also considered a rebuke of the Trump administration’s strict immigration policies.
Kouadio, who was first detained under the Obama administration, is now entitled to a bond hearing within 14 days, the judge ruled, at which the government has to show he poses a danger to the public or is a flight risk in order to continue his detention.
In February, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that under the immigration laws, people held in immigration detention, even for years, were not entitled to periodic hearings on whether they may be released on bail. But the Supreme Court did not decide whether the Constitution required such hearings, and sent the case back to a lower court to consider that issue.
Kouadio’s lawyers, Craig Relles and Steven Haskos, have said that their client, who had once worked for his country’s former president, Laurent Gbagbo, had his life threatened by supporters of Gbagbo’s successor, Alassane Ouattara, the current president.
Relles said Thursday that Hellerstein was “sending a message to the Trump administration that fundamental due process is alive and well.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.