First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli filed a 79-page appeal this week accusing a federal judge in California of running a "premeditated performance" when he tossed out the criminal case against a man charged with ramming law enforcement vehicles during an immigration arrest in South Los Angeles.
The target of the appeal is Judge Fernando M. Olguin, an Obama appointee who sits in California's Central District. Olguin dismissed the charges against 45-year-old Carlitos Ricardo Parias, known on TikTok as Richard LA, after ruling that Parias had been denied access to a lawyer while held in immigration detention.
Essayli's brief does not treat the dismissal as a close call. It portrays a judge who reached his conclusion before the facts were in, then worked backward to justify it. The appeal now goes to a panel of judges, and it arrives with a trail of other Olguin dismissals that federal prosecutors and an appeals court have already found troubling.
Parias was charged in October with assaulting a federal officer. The underlying allegation: during a targeted immigration enforcement stop in South Los Angeles, Parias allegedly rammed law enforcement vehicles while trying to flee. Officers opened fire, striking Parias in the elbow. A deputy U.S. Marshal was wounded by a ricochet bullet.
The case made headlines. Parias, an illegal immigrant, is currently held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County on immigration violations. But the criminal charges, the ones that stem from the alleged assault on federal officers, are the ones Olguin threw out.
The appeal filed by Essayli accuses Olguin of having "made up his mind" about the case from the start. The brief states that the judge "proclaimed that defendant's (mandatory) immigration detention was unlawful before defendant was even detained, and worked backward from that premise."
Essayli argued that ICE was legally required to detain Parias because he was in the country illegally and had been arrested for assaulting a law enforcement officer. The brief called the judge's handling of the matter a "premeditated performance" and said his conduct "strayed far outside the court's proper judicial role."
The language in the filing is direct:
"None of this was the fair, impartial assessment of legal and factual questions that judicial review requires."
That is a federal prosecutor telling an appellate panel, in writing, that a sitting judge abandoned impartiality. It is not a phrase deployed lightly in a legal brief.
The broader national tension between the judiciary and the executive branch has been a recurring flashpoint, with Chief Justice Roberts himself weighing in on the proper boundaries of criticism. But Essayli's brief rests on something more specific than political frustration, it rests on the judge's own record.
The appeal cites two other cases in which Olguin dismissed serious criminal charges. Together, the three cases form a pattern that prosecutors clearly want the appellate panel to consider.
In August, Olguin dismissed the federal case against Marco Antonio Arreola-Arreola, an illegal immigrant from Mexico charged with criminal possession of firearms. Arreola-Arreola had allegedly been caught on video inside a Downtown Los Angeles warehouse handling stolen Browning rifles. Those rifles, approximately 650 of them, had been swiped from trains heading from the Port of Los Angeles to Missouri. After the dismissal, Arreola-Arreola was taken into immigration custody, and he was eventually removed from the United States.
A man allegedly caught on camera handling hundreds of stolen military-grade rifles walks free on the criminal charge. That is the outcome Olguin's ruling produced.
Then there is the 2022 case of Nathan Wilson and Christopher Beasley. The two were charged with arson after attending a protest over the death of George Floyd in Santa Monica. They allegedly set a police car on fire and then posted video of it on social media. Olguin dismissed the case after prosecutors declined to provide evidence the defendants sought in support of a selective-prosecution claim.
Department of Justice lawyers appealed. In 2024, a federal appeals court reinstated the charges against Wilson and Beasley and sent the case back, to Olguin. Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, in a concurring opinion, wrote that "the district court far overstepped its boundaries."
That is two separate instances, before the Parias case, in which Olguin's dismissals were challenged by federal prosecutors. In one, an appellate court agreed the judge had gone too far. The question of where the line falls between judicial independence and judicial overreach is not abstract here. It has a case history.
President Obama appointed Olguin to California's Central District in 2012. His academic record offers a window into his worldview, one that prosecutors may believe colors his rulings.
In a 1989 master's thesis, Olguin wrote that "the United States has been instrumental in establishing a Central American political system 'characterized by the dominance of a wealthy landed elite governing...almost always with the collaboration of the military.'" He argued that "this system has resulted in extreme inequality, injustice, and poverty in most of the region" and that "local leaders have obtained US support in putting down the indigenous revolutionary movements by labeling them 'communist.'"
Academic writing from 1989 does not, by itself, prove bias in 2025. But when a judge's rulings consistently land on the side of dismissing charges against illegal immigrants and protest-related arsonists, and when those rulings are challenged or overturned, the thesis becomes more than a footnote. It becomes context.
During what appears to have been a confirmation process, Olguin stated he was "committed to the rule of law and will apply and uphold all laws of the United States, irrespective of my personal views on any particular area of law." His record on the bench invites scrutiny of that commitment. He did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Essayli's appeal will now be considered by a panel of judges. If the pattern holds, if the appellate court finds, as it did in the Wilson-Beasley matter, that Olguin exceeded his authority, the case against Parias could be reinstated.
Parias remains in custody at Adelanto on immigration violations. But the criminal charge, assaulting a federal officer, carries consequences that an immigration hold does not. Dismissing it sends a message, and not a helpful one, to anyone who might consider using a vehicle as a weapon against law enforcement during an arrest.
The broader concern about politicization within the justice system is not new. But the Parias case distills it into something concrete: a man is accused of ramming federal officers, a deputy marshal is wounded, and the judge who catches the case throws it out on grounds that the government's own lawyers call fabricated from a predetermined conclusion.
Olguin's defenders might argue he was protecting a defendant's constitutional rights. But Essayli's brief contends the judge declared the detention unlawful before the detention even happened. That is not rights protection. That is outcome selection.
The debate over how far judges should go in checking executive enforcement actions is legitimate. Reasonable people can disagree on where the line sits. But when a single judge racks up a record of dismissed cases involving illegal immigrants, stolen firearms, and torched police cars, and when appellate courts and federal prosecutors keep saying he went too far, the question stops being about any one ruling.
It becomes about whether the bench is being used as a policy lever. And in California's legal landscape, that question has a familiar ring.
A deputy U.S. Marshal took a ricochet bullet. The man accused of causing the confrontation had his charges dropped. And the judge who dropped them won't explain himself. The appellate panel should.
