An immigration judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, ordered the deportation in absentia of a 19-year-old Honduran man who was fatally shot six months before the hearing, ruling that he had failed to show up for court despite being presented with police records documenting his death. The judge’s order, entered on May 21, makes no mention that Levi Mendez-Maldonado had been killed in a shooting in November 2024.
Becca O’Neill, a lawyer with the Carolina Migrant Network, was preparing to represent Mendez-Maldonado in his asylum case and deportation defense before learning of his death. Mendez-Maldonado, a young father and mechanic, had come to the United States from Honduras as an unaccompanied minor at age 17 and had entered deportation proceedings upon his arrival at the border. After turning 18 in May 2024, he applied for asylum.
O’Neill attended the May 21 preliminary hearing on his behalf. At the outset, she notified Judge Amy Lee of her client’s death and presented Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department records of the homicide. According to O’Neill, Lee found the police records insufficient proof of death, even though a death certificate had been filed in late 2024.
“The whole thing probably took maybe five minutes. 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,” O’Neill told the Guardian.
The judge and the federal prosecutor continued with the hearing as planned, O’Neill said. The written removal order states: “Despite the written notification provided, Respondent failed to appear at the hearing, and no exceptional circumstances were shown for the failure to appear. Therefore, the immigration court conducted the hearing in absentia.”
“This is the banality of evil. All of this is so normalized and bizarre. Just a boilerplate order: he didn’t come to court, he didn’t demonstrate good cause. Well, he’s dead. And you know that because you saw a government website saying that he’s dead,” O’Neill said.
Stefanía Arteaga, the founder and executive director of the Carolina Migrant Network, described the ruling as emblematic of a broader pattern. “It shows that even after death, you can’t escape deportation,” Arteaga said.
The Charlotte immigration court handles cases from North and South Carolina and granted legal relief in roughly 1% of its cases in 2025, according to the Guardian. The court currently has a backlog of about 129,000 pending cases, the ninth-largest in the country. From 2020 to 2025, Lee denied nearly 90% of her 550 asylum cases in Charlotte, placing her in the middle of her peers in the same court, according to data from Trac Immigration.
O’Neill described Lee as tough, citing a separate case in which Lee ordered one of her clients removed to Ecuador, Guatemala or Honduras despite the client being Mexican. O’Neill said she filed a motion to reconsider arguing that her client had never been to any of those countries, and that Lee told her to “stop talking” and would not change her decision.
Paul Hunker, a Dallas-based former Immigration and Customs Enforcement counsel turned immigration lawyer, told the Guardian that federal regulation 239.2 permits the cancellation of a notice to appear in immigration court for several reasons, including death. Hunker, who served as chief counsel for ICE in Texas from 2003 to 2024, said the second Trump administration gives agencies “marching orders” to deny as many immigrants relief as possible.
Both O’Neill and Arteaga said they had never encountered a deportation order for a deceased immigrant in more than 20 years of working in North Carolina. A similar case occurred in 2024 in California, when 88-year-old Jose Mario Rodriguez Grimaldi faced deportation proceedings three years after his death, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Mendez-Maldonado had legal representation, which O’Neill said was rare for young people in immigration proceedings. “I’ve had clients who enter as unaccompanied minors as young as four years old who end up with removal orders because they don’t go to court. How is a four-year-old going to know when their hearing date is? It’s up to their sponsors, who are often undocumented themselves,” she said.
O’Neill said she had lost contact with Mendez-Maldonado and called him for months in 2025 to share that his work permit had been approved. A colleague eventually told her he had been killed. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department’s homicide unit told the Guardian the investigation into the shooting remains open.
“This is the banality of evil,” O’Neill said. “All of this is so normalized and bizarre.”