A Chicago judge ruled on Tuesday that a Mexican immigrant who was falsely accused of threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump can be released from a Wisconsin prison on bond.
In federal immigration court, Judge Carla Espinoza said Ramon Morales Reyes did not pose a risk to the community.
That contradicts a statement released by the Department of Homeland Security in late May, which accused Morales Reyes of authoring a letter that detailed a plot to shoot Trump. The statement included Morales Reyes’ photo and a screenshot of the letter he allegedly wrote.
“Thanks to our ICE officers, this illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump is behind bars,” Secretary Kristi Noem said in the statement.
Within days, this narrative quickly unraveled, and Milwaukee County prosecutors charged a different Wisconsin man with identity theft and witness intimidation charges. In a criminal complaint, the prosecutors said that man, Demetric D. Scott, was behind the letter sent to state and federal officials, and said he used the return address and name of Morales Reyes.
Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has said that Morales Reyes “is no longer under investigation for threats against the President, but will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”
In court, Judge Espinoza noted that Morales Reyes has an arrest record from 1996, but that he was only convicted on charges of disorderly conduct.
Kime Abduli, Morales Reyes’s attorney, believes Scott authored the letters he allegedly sent in an attempt to get her client deported.
“He made the decision to write these letters based on the current political climate and the fact that Trump is in office and there is this entire anti-immigrant, xenophobic agenda out there,” Abduli said.
Scott is being held at the Milwaukee County jail on armed robbery and aggravated battery charges. He is accused of slashing Morales Reyes with a box cutter while taking a bicycle from him in 2023. Morales Reyes was scheduled to testify against Scott at his trial next month.
Morales Reyes worked as a dishwasher in Milwaukee, where he lives with his wife and three children. He recently applied for a U visa which is meant to protect undocumented immigrants who become victims of serious crimes. But Abduli said the threat of deportation Morales Reyes now faces upends that principle.
“The whole point of the U visa is to say, even if you’re undocumented, please come forward and report crimes because our ultimate goal is to make sure that everybody is safe,” Abduli said. “So to have that kind of flipped on its head in this case, where the person who did all the things he was supposed to do to report the crime and make sure the rest of the community is safe against the actions of this person, now he’s in trouble.”
Abduli said this could have a chilling effect on undocumented immigrants and make them less likely to report crimes they witness.
Rhea Pribla Balsley, a third grade bilingual teacher at Meehan Elementary in Belvidere, was among a group of activists who gathered outside the immigration court in downtown Chicago for Morales Reyes’s hearing.
She was there because she fears what happened to Morales Reyes in Wisconsin could happen to the families of her Latino students. A handful of her students have already had their undocumented parents detained by ICE agents.
“I am petrified for my students and their families,” Pribla Balsley said. “Some of them can’t go back. If they go back, they won’t be living anymore.”
Morales Reyes’s next hearing is scheduled for July 10.
Anna Savchenko is a reporter for WBEZ. You can reach her at asavchenko@wbez.org.