A federal judge Monday ordered immigration officials to immediately release an Afghan immigrant who helped U.S. troops fight the Taliban before moving to Boulder County.
Mohammad Ali Dadfar, who lived in Louisville with his wife and four children after fleeing Afghanistan, was picked up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement sting while working as a long-haul truck driver. He has been held in a detention center in Missouri for nearly two months following his arrest at a weigh station along an interstate highway in Indiana.
“Ali’s family is overwhelmed and excited to see him,” said Marissa Seuc-Hester, who leads a volunteer ministry for immigrants at Christ the Servant Lutheran Church in Louisville and had helped the family with housing and other support. “Our community is celebrating this just order and cannot wait to welcome him home.”
Within hours of the judge’s order, by late Monday afternoon, Dadfar walked out of the detention center in Missouri. Friends in Louisville made arrangements to pick him up, and others, including his wife, were driving east to meet him, Seuc-Hester said.
U.S. District Judge M. Douglas Harpool, in the Western District of Missouri, ruled that Dadfar’s constitutional right to due process was violated and that he is entitled to immediate release.
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