WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026, accused a Biden-appointed federal judge in California of putting the public at risk by ordering the release of David Antonio Aviles Perez, an MS-13 member prosecutors in El Salvador identify as “La Bruja” (“the witch”) and who carries an international warrant for aggravated murder.

In a DHS statement, Mullin said U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta “has put American lives at risk by releasing a wanted murderer,” calling it “the SECOND time this dangerous illegal has been released back onto the streets in California.” He added: “If California’s leaders won’t protect Americans, DHS will.”

According to Fox News Digital and DHS, ICE arrested Aviles Perez on March 26 and held him at Otay Mesa Detention Center pending removal to El Salvador. Ohta ordered his immediate release on Aug. 26 after he filed a habeas petition, finding immigration officials violated his Fifth Amendment due process rights by holding him roughly five months without an individualized assessment of danger or flight risk and without a bond hearing. The order barred ICE from re-detaining him unless an immigration judge first holds a bond hearing.

“Although Petitioner appears to have previously been convicted following a fight with another individual in May 2023, the government has offered no evidence that it detained him after considering those facts and making an individualized determination of his danger to the public or flight risk,” Ohta wrote, per Fox. The ruling did not clear him of the Salvadoran murder conviction or find he posed no danger; it focused on process.

Salvadoran prosecutors say Aviles Perez was convicted in absentia in December 2025 and sentenced to 20 years for an aggravated murder in which gang members forced a victim to kneel before he was shot, Fox reported. In California in 2023 he was arrested in Monterey after allegedly swinging a machete at a homeless man; DHS says he was later released under state sanctuary limits on local-federal cooperation before the March ICE arrest. Ohta was appointed to San Diego Superior Court by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020 and to the Southern District of California by President Joe Biden in 2021.

The clash is the familiar one: judges enforcing bond and individualized-detention rules versus an administration that wants removal first and process later. Due process is not optional because a defendant is unpopular. Neither is public safety optional when the person at issue already has a foreign murder conviction and a machete assault record — which is why Congress, not a single habeas order, is where detention standards for removable aliens with violent records should be written clearly enough that neither side has to invent the law mid-case.

Sources