An immigration judge in Charlotte ordered Levi Mendez-Maldonado deported in absentia on 21 May 2026, even after his lawyer told the court at the start of the hearing that he had been killed in a shooting more than a year earlier.

Becca O’Neill was in court to handle the asylum case and deportation defense she had been preparing for Mendez-Maldonado, a Honduran man who came to the United States at 17 as an unaccompanied minor. Instead, she said the proceeding moved on quickly and the judge entered a removal order that treated him as if he had simply failed to show up.

That hearing mattered because it was not a routine calendar matter. It was the next step in a deportation case that had been pending since he arrived, and it came after O’Neill says she had already given the court police records showing Mendez-Maldonado had been murdered in November 2024. A death certificate was filed in late 2024, too.

O’Neill said Judge Amy Lee found the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department records insufficient and continued the hearing without acknowledging the death. The court order said only that Mendez-Maldonado had failed to appear and that no exceptional circumstances had been shown for the failure. It did not mention that he was dead.

O’Neill said the hearing lasted about five minutes. She said the judge and government attorney moved through it as though they were discussing a routine absence, not a death that had already been documented in court records. “This is the banality of evil,” she said, adding that the system is built to dehumanize noncitizens, especially Black people and those who are not white.

The Charlotte immigration court handles cases from North and South Carolina, and in 2025 it granted legal relief in roughly 1% of cases, a measure of how little room there is for respondents even before they appear in person. Mendez-Maldonado’s case had already been set in motion years earlier, when he was placed into deportation proceedings upon arrival, like other immigrants processed at the border.

The result leaves a stark gap in the record. Advocates say omitting a death from an official court order strips dignity from immigrant communities, and this case shows how far that erasure can go: even after death, a removal order can still be entered. What remains unanswered is why a filed death certificate and police records were not enough to stop the court from writing him out as merely absent.