In a ruling that challenges core immigration detention practices of the second Trump administration, U.S. federal Judge Gayles has rejected the government’s bid to hold Haitian business and political figure Dimitri Vorbe without bail, ordering immigration authorities to schedule a formal individualized bail hearing by August 24, 2026, or release him under court-supervised supervision. This decision marks a high-profile rebuke of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s aggressive use of little-used foreign policy authority to target foreign detainees on U.S. soil.
Per Judge Gayles’ formal order, immigration officials must also file a public status report with the court no later than August 31, 2026, outlining whether the bond hearing was held, what its final outcome was, and any updates to the broader proceedings tied to Vorbe’s detention challenge. All hearings must take place before the official U.S. Immigration Court, per the court’s mandate.
The legal battle surrounding Vorbe dates back to September 23, 2025, when federal agents arrested him at his private residence in South Miami. The charges against him rely on a rarely invoked foreign policy provision that allows detention based on stated national interest concerns. In an undated internal memo, Secretary Rubio alleged that Vorbe had “engaged in a campaign of violence and support for gangs, contributing to the destabilization of Haiti” and claimed his continued presence in the U.S. ran counter to American foreign policy priorities. Notably, Rubio has not released any public evidence to substantiate these serious accusations, leaving legal observers and analysts to question the actual motivation behind the arrest. Vorbe has long served as vice president of Haiti’s SOGENER SA, a power plant management firm that has been involved in a high-stakes legal dispute with the Haitian government over control of the country’s energy infrastructure, adding a layer of political context to his detention.
Since his arrest last year, Vorbe has remained in continuous federal detention, even though no immigration judge has yet issued a formal order for his removal from the United States. His case is now one of the most prominent examples of the Rubio-led State Department’s expanded use of this obscure foreign policy detention authority, a tool the current administration has deployed repeatedly to target individuals in recent months.
In its formal arguments before the court, the Trump administration advanced two key positions: first, that Vorbe was eligible to be held indefinitely without any opportunity to seek bail, and second, that the federal court lacked jurisdiction to even hear Vorbe’s appeal of his detention. Judge Gayles rejected both claims outright in his ruling. The judge clarified that U.S. federal law explicitly defines which categories of non-citizens are subject to mandatory, no-bail detention, and that individuals detained solely on foreign policy grounds — like Vorbe — are not included in that list.
Judge Gayles further found that Congress had intentionally excluded this detention category from mandatory detention rules, and that a federal immigration regulation adopted by the Department of Homeland Security to justify unlimited detention for this group exceeded the authority granted to the agency by Congress.
Vorbe’s case is not an isolated incident. Even though he had already appeared before an immigration court following his arrest, he is just one of thousands of immigration detainees currently stuck in detention facilities across South Florida, a backlog created by the Trump administration’s broad crackdown on undocumented and legally present immigrants that launched last year.