Judge Dan Trimble on Wednesday at Stewart Immigration Court in Lumpkin, Georgia, denied bond for Pedro Arturo Salmeron, 19, extending his stay in Stewart Detention Center indefinitely.

Byron Martinez, the director of operations for the Latino advocacy group Unidos We Stand, attended Salmeron’s bond hearing and told Rewire that Salmeron’s case was given “less than five minutes” with Judge Dan Trimble. Some immigration judges have just seven minutes to decide an undocumented immigrant’s fate, as the Washington Post reported last year.

Advocates, however, claim that Trimble “regularly denies bond” to asylum seekers. Trimble is one of two judges at Stewart Detention Court, the on-site immigration court at the Stewart Detention Center. He is also on the board of visitors for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, a combat training school for Latin American soldiers that former Panamanian President Jorge Illueca reportedly called “the biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.”

A 2012 Al Jazeera report noted the military academy is where some of Latin America’s “most notorious dictators graduated from.”

Salmeron was arrested during a series of January raids that occurred under Operation Border Guardian, an immigration enforcement policy primarily targeting Central American migrants over the age of 18 who came to the United States as unaccompanied children after January 2014. Six teens taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody as part of the operation who are from North Carolina have become known as the NC6.

Three NC6 members have been released from detention, while the remaining members, including Salmeron, are still awaiting release or deportation.

Under current law, those detained more than six months must be given a bond hearing before an immigration judge. At the time of Salmeron’s bond hearing Wednesday, he had been detained in Stewart for eight months.

Young asylum seekers detained under Operation Border Guardian say their lives are at risk if they are deported to their countries of origin. Salmeron, for example, fears deadly gang violence in his native El Salvador, advocates told Rewire.

At a vigil for the NC6 on Saturday, Salmeron’s mother, Carmen, expressed hope that her son would be home with their family shortly after the bond hearing. She was hopeful because, among other reasons, a judge expressed concern over the teen’s continued detainment in his federal hearing last week.

Additionally, North Carolina Rep. Alma Adams (D) paid Salmeron a visit in Stewart Detention Center and wrote a letter, shared with Rewire, to the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sarah Saldana, on Salmeron’s behalf for his bond hearing. In it, Adams asked that the agency “exercise existing statutory authority to immediately release” the teen on his own recognizance or on bond “at a fair and reasonable amount while he awaits a decision on his appeal.”

Byron Martinez told Rewire that the reasons “the judge gave [for denying bond] were that Pedro had an open appeal with the [Board of Immigration Appeals] and a bar complaint with his former counsel …. But those aren’t reasons to deny bond. Pedro could have easily been given a bond and then worn an ankle bracelet and attended hearings from the outside,” Martinez said.

On July 29, BIA granted a stay of deportation for the teen, pending legal proceedings around his request that his asylum case be reopened, in part because of inadequate legal counsel. The denial of bond means Salmeron will stay in detention until the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services reaches a decision on his asylum case, which can take longer than a year, advocates said.

Martinez asserts that because the NC6 have been “high-profile cases,” immigration agencies want to make an example of Salmeron by keeping him detained, with the ultimate goal that the teen will sign his own deportation papers. At a September 16 federal hearing for Salmeron, ICE attorneys implied that the teen was responsible for his own continued detainment because he could “’leave the country’ at any time” by signing his own deportation order to get out of detention.

Bryan Cox, ICE spokesperson for the southern region, told Rewire in a statement that Salmeron’s “detention is fully compliant with federal law and agency policy.”

Advocates told Rewire that it “obviously makes more sense” financially and otherwise to release the teen than to spend more than a hundred dollars a day keeping him detained, but that they anticipated this would be “a fight” with immigration agencies.

“There was no way they were going to release [the NC6] without a fight,” Martinez told Rewire. “The Department of Homeland Security, ICE, they all know that if it weren’t for the community, they would have deported these kids already. But we have a team of people working together, we have politicians talking about these cases, and lawyers handling all of the paperwork. We’re going to make it hard too. We’re going to fight too. We’re not going to stop until they’re all out.”