The owner of Uncle Lou’s Entertainment Hall is asking a federal judge for immediate release from ICE custody, arguing the agency violated his rights by leaving him in Orange County jail a week after his immigration hold was supposed to lapse.
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In court filings obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, attorneys representing Cleon Williams — affectionately known in Orlando’s music scene as Uncle Lou — said Williams’ continued detention is unlawful because Immigration and Customs Enforcement missed the mandated window to pick him up from the Orange County Jail following his May 9 arrest. Through its agreement with ICE, Orange County sets that window at 72 hours.
ICE moved Williams on Tuesday to the Baker County Detention Center west of Jacksonville.
Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office late Wednesday admitted they have “no explanation for why” Williams’ move was delayed, but said they are prepared to arrange a bond hearing for him. That’s a reversal of previous practice to deny such hearings, and comes following an appellate court’s ruling against the strict detention orders from President Donald Trump’s administration.
However, Phillip Arroyo, Williams’ attorney, argued to District Judge Julie Sneed that it’s too late for a bond hearing.
“The constitutional violation occurred before any hypothetical bond hearing and cannot be cured by sending him into immigration court after the fact,” Arroyo wrote in one filing.
Williams is a Jamaican national who entered the U.S. in 1987 on a temporary worker’s visa that later expired. He was arrested in the early hours of May 9 after his establishment was targeted for a late-night operation involving illegal alcohol sales, but was booked solely on an immigration detainer. It’s not clear what prompted the business to be targeted, but the case involving the alleged alcohol violation, a second-degree misdemeanor, is ongoing.
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Despite the supposed 72-hour limit for Williams’ jail detention, records filed in court show ICE agents didn’t even issue a warrant for his arrest until Tuesday, ten days after he went into local custody. In a filing late Thursday, Arroyo cited past rulings that warrantless arrests by ICE should happen only in cases where a migrant is a flight risk.
Williams, an icon of Orlando’s nightlife and musical community as well as the father of a U.S. citizen, does not fit that description, Arroyo contends.
One of the cases Arroyo cited was decided in April by Sneed, the same judge who will rule on Williams’ fate, stemming from the March 19 arrest of a Colombian woman by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents who stopped her while she was driving a passenger for Lyft. During her stop, the woman said she had a pending asylum claim and presented a Florida driver’s license as well as a work permit, which to Sneed meant she had no intention of fleeing.
A warrant for her detention was not issued until about three hours after she was arrested, and she spent 21 days in detention, sometimes sitting in the Orange County Jail and sometimes being moved around by ICE, part of a common ICE rebooking scheme aimed at resetting the detention clock. She didn’t appear in court until April 9.
“[T]he government has the ability to arrest someone without obtaining a warrant, but they need to do so when the immigration officer has reason to believe that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained,” Sneed said during that April 9 hearing, according to a transcript reviewed by the Sentinel. Four days later, the woman was ordered released.
As of Friday afternoon, Sneed has yet to issue a ruling or set a date for a hearing in Williams’ case. Even if he is released, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeremy Bloor said in the his response to Arroyo that ICE could detain him again.
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“If detained, he may request a bond hearing at any time,” Bloor wrote.