On March 19, 2003, a Cuban national named Miakel Guerra Morales wielded emergency axes and knives aboard an aircraft departing Nueva Gerona, Cuba, pressed blades against the throats of crew members, and forced the plane to divert to Key West, Florida. Children were on board. He was convicted of aircraft piracy and sentenced to 22 years in federal prison.
On July 8, 2026, a Clinton-appointed federal judge ordered him released onto the streets of an American city -- free to roam neighborhoods and move about the country freely.
U.S. District Judge John E. Steele of the Middle District of Florida granted Guerra Morales's habeas corpus petition, ruling that ICE had failed to demonstrate a "significant likelihood" that the hijacker could be removed "in the reasonably foreseeable future." Guerra Morales had been re-arrested by ICE on December 30, 2025, after previously being released under an order of supervision in March 2023. Judge Steele gave ICE 24 hours to let him go.
The judge's reasoning was procedural. Guerra Morales had a removal order on file for more than three years. He'd been detained for more than six months since his re-arrest. Cuba won't take him back, and protections under the Convention Against Torture complicated the process further. In Steele's view, the government couldn't hold someone indefinitely while sorting out logistics.
"Respondents have had more than three years since Guerra Morales's order of removal — and more than six months since his present detention — to remove him from the United States," Judge Steele wrote. He added: "The Government cannot lock individuals in a cell indefinitely as a workaround for a stalled deportation process."
Six defendants were convicted for their roles in the 2003 hijacking. At least a dozen Cuban nationals were aboard the aircraft that day. The crime wasn't ambiguous. It wasn't a misunderstanding at a traffic stop. A man commandeered a plane with axes and knives.
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis called Steele an "activist judge" who "forced ICE to release a criminal illegal alien who was convicted and sentenced to 22 years for hijacking a plane back into American communities." Bis added that it was "yet another example of an activist judge trying to thwart President Trump's mandate from the American people to remove criminal illegal aliens from our country."
The administration has a point about the mandate. Between January 20, 2025 and March 9, 2026, ICE deported 4,353 Cubans to Mexico alone, according to Newsweek. The machinery is working. Deportation flights are running. The bottleneck here wasn't a lack of effort — it was a lack of cooperation from Cuba and a legal framework that treats an unresolved timeline as grounds for release.
Judge Steele did leave one door open. "If removal becomes likely in the reasonably foreseeable future, ICE can re-detain," he wrote. So the government can arrest him again — once they've done the paperwork that Cuba refuses to facilitate.
Guerra Morales himself seemed to understand what happened better than most legal commentators. "If the judge hadn't been firm," he told reporters, "ICE wouldn't have let me go."
He's right. ICE wouldn't have. Because the people running immigration enforcement looked at a convicted aircraft pirate and concluded — reasonably — that he should stay locked up until they could put him on a plane he wasn't steering.