US District Court Judge Melissa R. DuBose said Monday that the government’s failure to tell her a Rhode Island immigrant was wanted for homicide in the Dominican Republic was a “massive breach” of the court’s trust. In a remote hearing, DuBose pressed Assistant US Attorney Kevin Bolan over why the warrant for Bryan Rafael Gómez was not disclosed before she ordered him released on April 28.
The dispute centers on a case that turned on a fact the court did not have when it ruled. The US attorney’s office said it had been told by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement not to inform the court about the warrant, and last week it confirmed that DuBose did not know about it when she issued the release order. Gómez, described as an undocumented immigrant, was freed ahead of a scheduled bond hearing in immigration court in June.
DuBose said the missing information mattered because it changed what she could consider. She told Bolan that the withheld warrant impeded her ability to make a thoughtful decision about whether Gómez should be held. “We operate here under the color of good faith and we’ve had a wonderful, functioning, working relationship with your office until this time,” she said, adding that rebuilding trust would take time.
Her remarks came after the Department of Homeland Security on April 30 issued a statement calling her an “activist judge” and criticizing her for releasing “a violent criminal illegal alien who is wanted for murder in the Dominican Republic.” DuBose said that post was “patently false” because it suggested the court knew Gómez was wanted for murder when it ordered his release. She also said the court was accused of “releasing a dangerous individual into our community, knowing that he was wanted for murder,” language she rejected as inaccurate.
Bolan said Monday that he did not know about an April 16 DHS press release that included details of the warrant until Friday. He also said ICE told him on April 24 not to confirm or deny the existence of a 2023 arrest warrant against Gómez because ICE had not yet received use authorization from authorities in the Dominican Republic. ICE later received confirmation on April 30 that the warrant was active and that it was authorized to disclose it in court proceedings.
The hearing exposed a narrower but serious question: whether the government can ask a judge to rule on detention while holding back information that is already circulating elsewhere inside the same bureaucracy. Bolan told the court, “It is something I’ve been wrestling with.” He said his understanding was that the Dominican Republic controlled whether the information could be disclosed, adding that he may not have a complete understanding and that this was part of the problem.
DuBose said she had been “racking my brain” trying to imagine a situation in which an attorney could withhold material information from a judge at a client’s request. Her comments suggested the court sees the issue as larger than one defendant or one release order. The case now turns on whether ICE and the US attorney’s office should have told the court about the Dominican Republic homicide warrant before DuBose ruled on April 28. Her answer Monday was plain: they should have, and the omission was enough to shake the court’s trust.
