A Green Card Appointment Led to Five Months in Federal Custody for a Kona Coffee Technician

A Routine Interview, a Five-Month Detention

In Kona, Hawaii—the state’s best-known coffee-growing region—a coffee farm worker’s immigration appointment turned into a prolonged stay in federal custody. Juan José Estrada Lopez, a Nicaraguan who arrived in the U.S. without documentation in 2022, went to a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in August 2025 for what he believed was a standard step in his green card process.

Instead, he was detained. He spent more than five months at the Federal Detention Center in Honolulu before being released in late January 2026.

From Welding to Coffee Processing in Hawaii

Before coming to the U.S., Estrada Lopez worked as a welder and on coffee farms in Nicaragua, where he built, repaired, and maintained processing equipment such as depulping and destoning machines. Through industry contacts, he learned of a similar opportunity in Hawaii and entered the country in 2022. He eventually worked on Kona coffee farms, where he met and married Emily Estrada, a U.S. citizen. The couple was pursuing Adjustment of Status, a route that allows certain undocumented individuals to become lawful permanent residents.

“Initially shocking and difficult to comprehend,” is how Estrada Lopez described the detention. “Neither my wife nor I expected that situation, as we believed we were following the proper processes.”

Legal Intervention and a Judge’s Ruling

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) held Estrada Lopez without bond for several months. Emily Estrada eventually found the ACLU of Hawaii while searching for an attorney.

“Private lawyers were going to charge her thousands of dollars, and we do this work pro bono,” says Leilani Stacy, an immigration rights attorney with the ACLU of Hawaii. “We’re really in it to protect people’s civil rights.”

Immigration cases are civil, not criminal, and Estrada Lopez had no criminal history. Yet he remained in federal custody for more than five months. “This administration said, ‘We’re only locking up hardened criminals,’ and ‘People need to go through the lawful process,’ and then people who are actively trying to go through the lawful process are the ones that are being punished,” Stacy says. According to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, more than 70% of ICE detainees have no criminal convictions.

On January 13, 2026, the ACLU of Hawaii filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court challenging the legality of his detention. Stacy argued that “detaining Mr. Estrada Lopez without bond is plainly contrary to the statutory framework of the Immigration and Nationality Act and contrary to both agency regulations and decades of consistent agency practice. It also violates Mr. Estrada Lopez’s right to due process by depriving him of his liberty without any consideration of whether such a deprivation is warranted.”

Before the judge could rule, Estrada Lopez had an immigration hearing on January 27, 2026. An immigration judge granted his Adjustment of Status request, and he was released the same day. Stacy says the ACLU’s lawsuit pressured the government to expedite the hearing and to waive any appeal of the green card approval. “We think that the collective pressure changed the government’s tone, and led to the outcome of him getting a release that same day.”

Disputed Accounts of Reporting

In an emailed statement, ICE public affairs officer Jason Sweeney said Estrada Lopez was detained after having “absconded from the Alternative to Detention program” following an initial arrest by Border Patrol after his 2022 entry. (The Alternative to Detention program allows certain individuals detained by ICE to be released under monitoring and reporting requirements.) In a follow-up, Sweeney said Estrada Lopez “did not fulfill those reporting obligations.”

Estrada Lopez refutes this, stating he has documentation showing he reported and attended appointments. “It may simply be some kind of misunderstanding,” he says.

Sweeney added that Estrada Lopez “remained in ICE custody pending removal proceedings, and was released Jan. 27, 2026, after an immigration judge’s ruling, thus receiving a due process.” Stacy acknowledged that Estrada Lopez received due process before the immigration judge, but she notes the habeas petition was based on his five months in custody without a bond hearing. “He was detained, we argued, in violation of due process because he didn’t get an opportunity to challenge his detention at the outset, which he should have been able to do.”

Estrada Lopez says he was not mistreated during his detention and that staff at the facility were professional, with most even kind. Still, he describes the experience as frustrating and helpless. “Everything depended on the judge’s decision and potential actions from DHS,” he says. “There was a lot of uncertainty and disbelief in the system. It was a very difficult time.”

Enforcement Pressure on Hawaii’s Coffee Industry

ICE enforcement in Hawaii increased sharply in 2025. While the state had fewer agents than places like Minnesota, the number of people detained quadrupled compared to 2024, according to reporting by Honolulu Civil Beat.

Hawaii’s coffee sector depends heavily on migrant labor. The previous harvest was affected by ICE raids: in September, Civil Beat’s Jeremy Hay reported that more than 100 coffee workers on the Big Island had been arrested and deported, while others chose not to travel to the state for fear of detention. ICE agents also targeted the children of immigrant farmworkers, ostensibly to check on their welfare but also to reach the adults caring for them, Hay reported.

“Immigrant labor and migrant labor has played a really large role in shaping what the coffee industry looks like,” Rep. Jeanné Kapela, whose family runs a coffee farm, told us last year. Migrant workers typically fly in from California for the harvest, but Kapela said that did not happen in 2025. “If there are no people flying in seasonally, then who’s going to work our farms?”

State courthouses and other administrative facilities have also increasingly become enforcement targets, according to immigration attorneys. Arrests at Massachusetts courthouses, for example, tripled over the first nine months of the second Trump administration.

Stacy believes Estrada Lopez’s case stemmed from a policy change in July 2025. That month, acting ICE director Todd Lyons issued a memo stating the agency had authority to detain individuals deemed illegally present without a bond hearing “for the duration of their removal proceedings.” Previously, undocumented people without criminal records were released on bond while their cases proceeded; under the new policy, they could be held for months or years, even if they had lived in the U.S. for a long time.

“Nationally, we’ve never seen this scale of people locked up while they’re going through the lawful process,” Stacy says. In the ICE statement, Sweeney wrote, “As a matter of policy, ICE is committed to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws fairly and in accordance with due process.”

Immigration rights groups quickly challenged the memo. Matt Adams, legal director for the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said in an ACLU press release that the policy “blatantly violates the immigration laws that have been in effect for almost thirty years.” In November, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to provide bond hearings, but that ruling was overturned by an appeals court in early April.

Community Backing and a Return to Work

Estrada Lopez says the Kona coffee community supported him during his detention. “My boss and coworkers stood behind me,” he says. “One of our farmers even gave my wife money to put toward my commissary while I was detained.”

The ICE policy of detention without bond that affected Estrada Lopez remains in place. A recent Bloomberg Law report described the difficulties individuals and families face navigating “overloaded” immigration courts and a “turbocharged” approach to deportation. Habeas corpus filings have since increased around the U.S. and in Hawaii. “This is happening to countless people across the country,” Stacy says. “It has been a really powerful example of the effect that this administration is having on individuals who are real, who are human, and who have to suffer and live with the consequences of a very abstract policy.”

After his release, Estrada Lopez returned to work immediately. He had been installing a dry mill, a project that stalled while he was incarcerated. “When I returned, I focused on picking up where I left off and getting the project moving again,” he says.