Immigration judge orders deportation of murdered teen despite death notification

On a May morning in Charlotte, North Carolina, an immigration judge sat down to hear a case that had been scheduled for months. The respondent did not appear. Judge Amy Lee noted his absence, found him in violation of court orders, and signed a deportation order. The case took about five minutes. What the judge's written order did not mention—what it conspicuously omitted—was that the young man she was ordering removed from the country had been dead for six months.

Levi Mendez-Maldonado was seventeen when he crossed the border alone from Honduras, seeking asylum in the United States. He was placed immediately into deportation proceedings, as all unaccompanied minors are. He found an attorney, Becca O'Neill, who took his case pro bono. He found work as a mechanic. He became a father. In November 2024, he was shot and killed. A death certificate was filed. Police records were generated. The case should have ended there.

But the immigration system does not end cases easily. Mendez-Maldonado's hearing was scheduled for May 21, 2026—seventeen months after his death. O'Neill, his lawyer, attended on his behalf. At the start of the hearing, she told Judge Lee that her client was dead. She presented Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department records documenting the fact. Lee examined the documents and found them insufficient. The hearing proceeded. The federal prosecutor said nothing. The judge said nothing. Five minutes later, it was over. The order was signed: failure to appear, no exceptional circumstances shown, removal ordered in absentia. Mendez-Maldonado's death appeared nowhere in the official record.

O'Neill sat in disbelief. "The whole thing probably took maybe five minutes," she would later recall. "The attorney acted like we were talking about the weather. The judge didn't take a moment to reorient herself after hearing he was dead." She did not contest the order. What would have been the point? The machinery had already moved.

The case exposes a system that advocates say is fundamentally designed to process people rather than to hear them. The Charlotte immigration court, which handles cases from North and South Carolina, granted legal relief in roughly one percent of cases in 2025. It carries a backlog of approximately 129,000 pending cases—the ninth-largest in the country. Judge Lee herself has denied nearly ninety percent of her asylum cases over the past five years. O'Neill describes her as immovable. Earlier this year, Lee ordered one of O'Neill's clients deported to Ecuador, Guatemala, or Honduras—none of which the client had ever visited. When O'Neill objected, Lee told her to stop talking.

Federal regulation explicitly permits judges to cancel a notice to appear for reasons including death. Paul Hunker, a former chief counsel for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas, confirmed that Lee could have simply dismissed the case. She chose not to. Hunker believes the current administration is pressuring immigration agencies to deny relief at nearly all costs. "The administration is putting pressure on ICE attorneys to achieve outcomes," he said. "Never agree to a bond."

Mendez-Maldonado had done everything right. He had legal representation—rare among unaccompanied minors. He had a sponsor, his older brother, who acted as his guardian. He had applied for asylum through proper channels. His work permit had been approved. O'Neill had been trying to reach him for months in 2025 with good news. A colleague finally told her he was gone.

Neither O'Neill nor Stefanía Arteaga, founder of the Carolina Migrant Network, had encountered a deportation order for a deceased immigrant in more than twenty years of work in North Carolina. But similar cases have occurred. In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security sent multiple deportation notices to the home of an eighty-eight-year-old man in California—three years after he had died. The Los Angeles Times confirmed at least three more such cases. The system, it seems, does not stop for death. It does not acknowledge it. It does not pause. It simply continues, generating orders, filling dockets, moving toward its predetermined outcome. Mendez-Maldonado's case is closed now. But the investigation into his death remains open, and the question of how a judge can order the removal of someone who no longer exists lingers unanswered.