U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta ordered David Antonio Aviles Perez released from federal custody in California after finding immigration officials had held him for five months without a bond hearing. The ruling sent him out of detention even as he is described as a 35-year-old MS-13 gang member wanted for murder in El Salvador.
The release order is drawing attention because it puts a court’s due-process ruling at the center of a case that involves a man accused by Salvadoran prosecutors of a brutal gang killing. That is why Aviles Perez, also known as "the witch," is being searched now: his custody status changed on the spot, and the legal fight around him immediately became a test of how far immigration officials can go while removal proceedings unfold.
Ohta said officials had not made an individualized finding that Aviles Perez posed a danger to the public or a flight risk. In her view, holding him for five months without giving him a chance to argue for release crossed the line, even though the accusations against him are severe.
The underlying case reaches back to a 2014 gang killing in El Salvador. Prosecutors said Aviles Perez and another MS-13 member chased a man through a mountainous area in La Unión, where fellow gang members forced the victim to stop and kneel. They said the victim was held by the shoulders as the two approached, then shot in the chest, back and face before the group fled. Alvise Pérez was convicted in December 2025 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for aggravated murder in that case.
That sequence is the friction in the ruling. Ohta ordered release despite the government’s portrayal of Aviles Perez as a dangerous fugitive, and Markwayne Mullin attacked the decision on Saturday, saying the judge had put American lives at risk by releasing a wanted murderer. He also said it was the second time the same person had been released back onto the streets in California, and argued that sanctuary politicians were playing politics from the bench.
The case now sits inside a broader fight over the Trump administration’s authority to keep immigrants detained while removal proceedings continue. What happens next is the unanswered part that matters most: whether officials seek to keep Aviles Perez in custody anyway, or whether the release order stands and becomes another example used to argue that bond hearings cannot be skipped for months at a time.
