A Plane Hijacker From Cuba Is Walking Free Thanks To A Democrat-Appointed Judge

A Clinton-appointed federal judge ordered the release of a Cuban national who hijacked a passenger plane in 2003, freeing him from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention after he served more than two decades in prison for his crimes.

Maikel Guerra Morales was released last week despite his role in the hijacking of a Cuban Airlines flight and forcing it to divert from Cuba to Florida. U.S. District Judge John E. Steele said he granted Morales’ petition for release because he’d been held in ICE custody for too long.

During the hijacking, Morales assaulted the flight crew and forced the pilot to divert the aircraft to Key West, where it was intercepted by fighter jets, according to the New York Post, which cited his release order.

The U.S. Marshals Service arrested Morales, who was later convicted of aircraft piracy and conspiracy to interfere with a flight crew.

The Department of Homeland Security blasted Judge Steele’s decision.

“This activist judge forced ICE to release a criminal illegal alien who was convicted and sentenced to 22 years for hijacking a plane back into American communities,” Homeland Security Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement.

“This is 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. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS will continue to fight for the detention and removal of criminal illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country,” she added.

DHS said Morales received a deportation order on March 1, 2023, and that ICE took him into custody in December 2025 after he completed his prison sentence.

Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro greets 22 March 2003 in Havana passengers and crew who were aboard a Cuban plane hijacked earlier in the week to Florida. (Photo by PABLO PILDAIN/AFP via Getty Images)

ICE detainees, like Morales, have been increasingly filing what are known as habeas petitions to get released from detention centers across the country, as previously reported.

In March, Timothy Courchaine, United States Attorney for the District of Arizona, told The Daily Wire that his office had gone from receiving 10 habeas petitions in immigration cases to “nearly a thousand” since Trump’s second term began.

“It is definitely a new trend … Now, those aren’t all just the bond hearings, but that’s the vast, vast, vast majority,” Courchaine told The Daily Wire.

“In most of them, they are [granting bond] … so we’ve been losing almost all of these and the folks will be released,” he added.

Immigration lawyers resort to filing habeas petitions after it becomes clear that their clients either have no chance of obtaining bond from immigration judges or have already been denied bond.

Scott Mechkowski, former ICE deputy field office director in New York, likened it to taking “two bites of the apple … because you essentially have the immigration judges already rendered that that person’s on bond eligible or not going to give them a bond.”