David Antonio Aviles Perez goes by "La Bruja." That's Spanish for "The Witch." He is 35 years old, a confirmed MS-13 gang member, and wanted in El Salvador for aggravated murder.

In 2014, Aviles Perez and fellow gang members chased a man through the mountains in La Unión, El Salvador. They forced the victim to his knees, held him by the shoulders, and shot him multiple times — in the chest, in the back, and in the face.

El Salvador convicted him in December 2025. He was sentenced to 20 years.

He was in California when the conviction came down.

In 2023, he was arrested in Monterey after swinging a machete at a homeless man at Laguna Grande Park. Officers found the machete in the parking lot of a nearby Holiday Inn. He was not deported.

ICE arrested him in San Diego on March 26, 2026, and placed him in the Otay Mesa Detention Center. DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis publicly announced the arrest on April 1. The agency knew exactly who they had.

On August 26, U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta — appointed to the federal bench by Joe Biden — ordered ICE to release him by 5 p.m. the following day.

Her reason: ICE hadn't scheduled a bond hearing fast enough after his March arrest.

She did not dispute the murder conviction. She did not dispute the 20-year sentence. She did not dispute the international warrant. She found that ICE had afforded him "no process before or after his detention" and determined that was sufficient grounds for release.

So the man who held a victim at gunpoint in the mountains of El Salvador and shot him in the face is walking free in California. Not because the conviction was wrong. Not because the evidence was questioned. Because the government's scheduling moved too slowly.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin responded publicly. "This radical activist judge has put American lives at risk by releasing a wanted murderer," he said. Then he added the detail that makes this worse: this was the second time California had released Aviles Perez.

The second time.

Under Judge Ohta's order, the federal government now has to prove — by clear and convincing evidence — that a convicted MS-13 murderer with an international warrant and a machete arrest is a danger to the community before they can take him back into custody.

The court knows what he did. Everyone knows what he did. The El Salvador conviction is on the record. The machete is in an evidence log in Monterey. The murder victim has been dead for twelve years.

The question Judge Ohta has answered is whether her paperwork deadline outweighs all of it. She decided it does. The Secretary of Homeland Security is calling her a radical activist on the record. The only people who haven't weighed in yet are the ones who will be living near David Antonio Aviles Perez next.