As President Donald Trump reflected on his second term this weekend, believing that his approach to immigration “both helped and hurt” the Republicans in the midterm elections, a University of Maryland School of Pharmacy instructor spent his 110th day in federal immigration custody.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Dr. Berhanu Kibret at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport on July 21, citing a visa from Ethiopia that expired in May 2024.

Kibret’s attorneys has spent the past several months trying to have the instructor released from an ICE facility in Western Oklahoma, arguing that he was in a yearslong period of authorized stay when he was arrested. A bond request was denied, and a habeas corpus petition arguing Kibret’s incarceration is illegal has not been acted on for nearly two months.

According to a ProPublica analysis of court records, habeas cases in Oklahoma’s Western District take a median of 63 days to be closed for ICE detainees, one of the longest rates in the country.

“It’s really just mind blowing that a case can sit in federal district court claiming unlawful detention, and the government does nothing to hear that case or try to adjudicate that case,” said attorney Ronia Dubbaneh. “So they’re continuing to hold him unlawfully, and there’s really not much that we can do about that.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Monday that Kibret, who first came to the United States for research before becoming an instructor, will “remain in ICE custody pending his immigration proceedings.”

“Under the leadership of President Trump, DHS will enforce our nation’s laws and continue to deliver historic successes,” the department said. “The border is secure and criminal illegal aliens terrorizing our communities have been deported.”

But in the wake of this month’s midterm elections, which saw the Democrats secure control of both chambers of Congress and leadership of several historically Republican states, the president reflected on the effect his immigration policies may have had on voters.

Trump, whose 2024 presidential campaign positioned mass deportation as a key issue, told “60 Minutes” on Sunday that his immigration platform may have been “too tough,” and that he would like to collaborate with the incoming Democratic majority on policies through the rest of his second term.

Federal statistics show that ICE arrested more than 321,000 people in 2025, nearly tripling its year-to-year figures.

“I think I got an A+ for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out,” Trump said on Sunday’s telecast. “But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, [that] created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.”

When Kibret was detained in Texas, where he’d been honored as a “teacher of the year” by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said he’d overstayed his visa “against our nation’s laws.”

But Kibret’s attorneys say the educator has had a federal application pending for years that’s allowed him to live and work in the country while it was under review.

“It wasn’t his fault that the government never adjudicated the application by the time he was placed into detention,” Dubbaneh told The Baltimore Sun. “It was entirely the government’s fault for that delay.”

Kibret’s arrest in late July came less than a week before ICE detained Johns Hopkins University researcher Fatimah Ameaka as she boarded a domestic flight out of the BWI Marshall Airport.

While Ameaka was eventually released, the academics’ arrests sparked questions about ICE’s local strategy and the targets of its immigration enforcement actions. A New York Times report published days after Kibret’s arrest said a data-sharing agreement between ICE and the Transportation Security Administration has allowed the Trump administration access to people with expired visas.

When asked whether ICE plans to slow down its airport arrests given Trump’s statements on Sunday, the DHS spokesperson said the department will continue enforcing the nation’s laws and that “being in detention is a choice.”

“This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport,” they said.

Alex Likowski, a spokesperson for the University of Maryland, Baltimore said that Kibret’s faculty colleagues have been covering his teaching responsibilities this semester.

“In the meantime, we’re all staying hopeful that his situation is resolved soon and that he can return to the work that he loves,” Likowski said.

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