Venezuelan woman released from wrongful ICE detention in Arizona after 9 months

"They stole so much time from me. I mean, I lost everything in there. I thank God that I have my health, that I have my life, that I'm free now," she said June 30, speaking from her home in Texas three days after her release from Eloy.

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security attorney admitted in an April court filing that Rodriguez Balza has protected status in the U.S. and couldn't be detained on the basis of her immigration status. But her release was delayed due to the U.S. District Court in Arizona being overwhelmed with petitions from detained immigrants, her attorney said.  

Rodriguez Balza, 26, is trying to focus on the positive, but has experienced insomnia, anxiety and an unnerving sense of "vertigo" ever since her detention, she told the Arizona Daily Star.

She'd been working for an electrical company and studying English before ICE arrested her at a routine check-in in September 2025.

She now faces myriad uncertainties, including having to reapply for her old job, waiting the outcome of her pending asylum claim and managing her newfound fear of driving and going out in public.

"I'm not the same person I was before," she said, speaking in Spanish. "Time can't be recovered, you know? But I'm not going to dwell on recovering something that's gone forever. I have to focus on the present, on what I'm going to do from now on. ... I really have to start from scratch, like when I arrived here."

Rodriguez Balza fled Venezuela in 2019, after she and her family were threatened by government-affiliated agents, due to Rodriguez Balza's protests against former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's regime.

Less than a week after the Arizona Daily Star reported on Rodriguez Balza's habeas corpus petition, which was languishing in U.S. District Court, a federal judge signed an order for her release on June 25. Rodriguez Balza was released from Eloy two days later.

Habeas corpus petitions allow detained people, including immigrants, to challenge the legality of their detention in the federal District Courts, bypassing the immigration court system, which is an administrative system under the executive branch.

The U.S. District Court in Arizona is among those most hard-hit by the recent boom in habeas filings, and court officials are taking steps to alleviate the strain, including implementing a policy that would prevent the kind of unnecessary delay Rodriguez Balza faced before her release.

Habeas petitions increasing

Rodriguez Balza was caught up in multiple issues, by no fault of her own, that led to her wrongful and unnecessarily long detention, said her attorney Santiago Reich, who is based in Texas.

"Erianny has the serious misfortune of being in the nexus of some of the most contested issues of law in immigration law today," he said, including the Trump administration's restrictions on immigration judges' ability to release detainees on bond, and its targeting of the Temporary Protected Status program that's prompted lengthy and complex litigation.

(The Supreme Court just green-lit the Trump administration's terminations of TPS for Haiti and Syria, arguing courts don't have jurisdiction to review whether the terminations were made in accordance with the law.)

Additionally, Rodriguez Balza's habeas corpus petition — a legal process that's become a lifeline for detained immigrants nationwide — was stalled for months in the stretched District Court system, Reich said.

In an April 15 court filing, a DHS attorney admitted that Rodriguez Balza's TPS was still active and said the agency does "not oppose her release."

But two months passed before U.S. District Court Judge Angela Martinez, based in Tucson, signed a release order for Rodriguez Balza, likely due to the court's backlog, Reich said.

ICE could have used its discretion at any time to release Rodriguez Balza, once its parent agency DHS determined she was wrongly detained, Reich said. But ICE officials chose to keep her incarcerated, he said.

Habeas corpus filings have soared since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025 and implemented policies to maximize the number of immigrants held in ICE detention, including those who entered the U.S. legally at ports of entry.

In 2024, detained immigrants filed just four habeas petitions in the U.S. District Court in Arizona, according to court officers. But the number of filings increased to 297 in 2025, after Trump took office.

So far this year, the number of habeas filings has exploded to more than 1,700 in the District of Arizona — already nearly six times the number for all of 2025, with half of 2026 still remaining.

More than 500 of the habeas petitions are still currently pending, as of June 23, said Debra Lucas, clerk of court for the U.S. District Court in Arizona, whose office provided the habeas-filing statistics.

"This is not a usual occurrence," she told the Star. "There has been an overwhelming number of these cases being filed."

Earlier this month ICE spokesman Fernando Burgos shared a statement from DHS with the Star that falsely claimed Rodriguez Balza's Temporary Protected Status was terminated in November 2025, despite the same agency admitting in the April 15 sworn court filing that Rodriguez Balza is one of a "small number" of TPS recipients whose status is still active and that she could be released. 

Neither DHS nor ICE could explain why Rodriguez Balza was arrested in September 2025, two months before the DHS statement claims — incorrectly — that her TPS expired. Both agencies ignored the Star's queries on the matter.

District Courts coping

The surge in habeas filings in the U.S. District Court in Arizona has become so unwieldy that court officials are taking new steps to help ICE detainees get a quicker decision, and to reduce caseloads for federal judges.

In June, Chief U.S. District Judge Jennifer Zipps signed a general order establishing a procedure for magistrate judges to assist district court judges in adjudicating the petitions. Magistrate judges, who are appointed by district judges, are more limited in which proceedings they preside over, but they can handle civil cases — such as habeas petitions — as long as both parties consent.

"Given the unprecedented volume of these filings, it is necessary to expand the pool of available judges and standardize a schedule to expedite resolution of these cases," the June 15 order reads.

The general order also directed DHS to release a detainee within two days of filing a notice that the agency doesn't oppose a detainee's release, rather than waiting for a judge's official release order.

Had the rule been in place in April, it would have prevented Rodriguez Balza from spending two more months at Eloy, Reich said.

"I think this is an extremely good move," he said of the court's new policy. But it's "puzzling" the policy is even necessary, he said.

"Detaining someone costs about $160 a day. It's not cheap. And if they (DHS) recognize that they have no reason to keep somebody, why are they still spending this money?" he said. "All it does is keep someone like Erianny locked up for 60 more days than is necessary."

District Court judges in other areas of the 9th Circuit have also offered to help adjudicate Arizona habeas cases, to help to chip away at the backlog, clerk of court Lucas said.

This kind of collaborative approach has only happened once before in the U.S. District Court in Arizona, after Judge John Roll was killed in the Jan. 8, 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, at a time when the court already had several judicial vacancies, she said.

Other than that, "This is the only time I recall in my career that we've had to resort to this," said Lucas, whose career spans 40 years.

Recovering despite fear

The day Rodriguez Balza was released from Eloy, where she said detainees are "treated like animals," she didn't feel the happiness she expected. She experienced what she thinks was a panic attack and has felt a strange sense of "vertigo" ever since, she said.

Since her release from ICE detention, she's only left her house for necessary trips, she said.

"You still leave with the fear of going back to that place," she said of Eloy. "I'm kind of blocked. I don't want to talk to anyone, I don't want anyone to visit me."

She doesn't understand the U.S. government's focus on detaining and deporting taxpaying immigrants like herself who have committed no crimes, or those who have only committed civil immigration violations.

"You're destroying a human being's life. There's no humanity, no empathy. This government here, it's inhumane," she said.

But despite the current U.S. policies, Rodriguez Balza said she loves America and has found most people she's met here to be compassionate and supportive. And until recently, she felt safe here, she said.

"My greatest wish is to be able to achieve stability here, to have my papers here," she said. "This is a country of opportunities. If you like to work, you can achieve it."

Rodriguez Balza's TPS is scheduled to expire in October, but she can stay in the U.S. pending the outcome of her asylum petition, which will likely take some time, Reich said. 

In the meantime, ICE appears to be escalating its detention efforts nationwide, he said. The New York Times reported Wednesday that more than 10,000 people were detained in the previous five days alone, as the White House pushes ICE to make more arrests.

Many of those immigrants will file habeas petitions challenging their detention, Reich said. 

For busy District Courts struggling with the surge in habeas petitions, "this problem is about to get a lot worse," he said.