An Immigration Judge Ordered Him Deported. A Clinton Judge Set Him Free. Now He's Charged With Rape

ICE had Marcotulio Melendez Diaz locked up in Texas with a deportation order against him. In August, a Clinton-appointed federal judge ordered him released anyway. Now prosecutors in Minnesota say the 42-year-old Honduran illegal alien raped a woman inside her own home while working there as a handyman, two days after his deportation order became final.

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin broke the story Monday, posting the federal release order and the Minnesota criminal complaint. ICE answered within the hour. "This is what happens when activist judges side with criminal illegal aliens over Americans," the agency said. "ICE had him in custody, a federal judge ordered him released, and now an American woman has suffered a horrific crime that could have been PREVENTED."

How he got out

According to ICE officials, Melendez Diaz crossed illegally into Texas and was caught and released by the Biden administration in April 2024. ICE arrested him in Minnesota in January 2026 during Operation Metro Surge and moved him to detention in Texas. On March 30, an immigration judge ordered him deported. He appealed.

While that appeal sat at the Board of Immigration Appeals, his lawyers went to federal court. On Aug. 7, U.S. District Judge Orlando L. Garcia of the Western District of Texas in San Antonio granted his petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the centuries-old order that forces the government to justify holding someone. Garcia, a former Texas state legislator, was put on the bench by President Bill Clinton.

The order told ICE to release Melendez Diaz "under conditions no more restrictive than those in place before the detention" by Monday, Aug. 10. Garcia called it a "FINAL JUDGMENT" and closed the case. Melendez Diaz went back to Minnesota.

The appeals court had hit pause

Here is the part most coverage skips. Garcia did not rule in a vacuum. His own order acknowledges that the Fifth Circuit, the appeals court over Texas, had agreed on July 21 to "issue a precedential order staying the district courts' judgments pending en banc review" in a case over whether people like Melendez Diaz can be held without a bond hearing while their cases move forward.

Garcia read that pause narrowly. The Fifth Circuit, he noted, "only stayed the three judgments before it," and the stay "does not prohibit its continued resolution of the hundreds of pending immigration habeas petitions on due process grounds." He called "the notion that district courts must now stay all action across the hundreds of habeas proceedings challenging mandatory detention" untenable, and he leaned on what he called "the broad consensus among the district courts."

Put plainly: the full appeals court was still deciding whether detention like this is legal, and the district judge chose not to wait. Think of a referee who knows the call is under video review and blows the whistle anyway. The word "hundreds" is his, too, which means Melendez Diaz was not a one-off. He was one file in a stack.

Two days after the order went final

On Oct. 9, the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected Melendez Diaz's appeal, making his deportation order final. By then he was back in Minnesota and out of ICE's hands.

Two days later, prosecutors say, he struck. The Ramsey County complaint, filed Oct. 26, charges him with first-degree criminal sexual conduct, penetration causing injury with the use of coercion, for an attack on or between Oct. 11 and Oct. 12. The charge carries up to 30 years in prison or a $40,000 fine, or both.

According to the complaint as described by Melugin, Melendez Diaz overpowered the woman and repeatedly raped her in her home in Mounds View, a suburb north of St. Paul, and her own indoor surveillance system recorded it. He is being held on $150,000 bond, and ICE has placed a detainer on him so he can't simply walk out if he posts it.

What it means

The fight over mandatory detention is not an abstract law-school debate. When judges order ICE to let go of people who already have deportation orders, those people do not wait politely in a lobby. Melendez Diaz went right back to the state where ICE had found him, and he went back to work in strangers' homes.

Melugin said he reached out to Judge Garcia's office and courtroom deputy for comment. The Fifth Circuit's full court has still not settled the detention question Garcia refused to wait on.

A criminal complaint is only an accusation, and Melendez Diaz is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court. But the deportation order, the release order and the date he got out are not in dispute. They are on paper, signed.