Federal immigration agents arrested a Mauritanian national who allegedly crossed the southern border illegally in 2023, filed what the Department of Homeland Security calls a fraudulent asylum claim based on homosexuality, and then secured a taxpayer-funded job as a correctional officer at an Indiana county jail, the same jail run by the sheriff whose daughter he married.
DHS identified the man as Selah Dine Habib, 28, and said he was taken into custody on May 21. He remains in ICE detention at the Clay County Jail facility in Brazil, Indiana, and is contesting a final deportation order, Fox News Digital reported.
The case reads like a catalog of the failures that defined the Biden-era border. An illegal border crosser was caught and released. He filed an asylum application that federal officials now say was built on a lie. He obtained work authorization, passed the government's own employment-verification system, married into a local law-enforcement family, and ended up guarding inmates inside a county lockup, all before anyone in authority connected the dots.
DHS told Fox News Digital that Habib entered the United States illegally in March 2023 near Lukeville, Arizona. Rather than being detained or removed, he was released into the interior under the Biden administration's catch-and-release policies.
Federal officials said Habib then filed a pending asylum application in which he claimed to be homosexual, a basis that can strengthen an asylum case for applicants from countries where homosexuality is criminalized. Mauritania, his home country in northwest Africa, is one such nation.
But investigators later discovered that Habib married a woman after entering the country. DHS officials stated plainly what they believe that means:
"His pending asylum application is believed to be fraudulent, as he applied based on homosexuality in 2023 but married a woman in 2025."
The marriage was not to just any woman. Indianapolis radio station WIBC, which first broke the story, reported that Habib married the daughter of Jay County Sheriff Larry Ray Newton in 2025. Shortly after, he joined the Jay County Jail in Portland, Indiana, as a correctional officer.
The Jay County Auditor's Office confirmed to WIBC that Habib submitted an I-9 form with supporting documentation when he was hired. The office ran an E-Verify check, the federal government's electronic system designed to confirm a new hire's work eligibility.
The result came back clean. The auditor's office stated:
"I am able to confirm that Mr. Habib submitted an I-9 with documentation, and an E-Verify Check was completed at the time of employment. The report came back as employment authorized."
The office added that any discrepancy flagged by the E-Verify system would have halted the onboarding process immediately. In other words, the system worked exactly as designed, and still let a man DHS now calls an illegal immigrant walk into a law-enforcement job.
That distinction matters. As the Washington Times noted, ICE itself drew a sharp line: "To be clear: Work authorization does NOT give someone legal status to be in our country." A person can hold a valid work permit while still lacking lawful immigration status, a gap in the system that the Biden administration's mass-release policies widened into a chasm.
The auditor's office also made clear that it bears no responsibility for deeper vetting. It said departments handle their own reference checks, background checks, and drug tests before submitting new employees. The sheriff, the office said, "would be able to speak to the standard practices completed in his office."
Sheriff Newton confirmed Habib's employment to WIBC, saying Habib served as an unarmed correctional officer after presenting employment authorization documents that cleared the hiring process. What additional background screening the sheriff's office performed, if any beyond E-Verify, remains unclear.
Step back and consider what happened here. A man crossed the border illegally. Border agents caught him and let him go. He filed an asylum claim that federal officials now say was a fabrication. The government issued him work authorization anyway. The government's own verification database confirmed that authorization. A county jail hired him to guard prisoners. And none of the safeguards designed to prevent exactly this outcome raised a single flag, until ICE agents showed up two years later.
Every link in that chain involves a federal system that either failed or was deliberately loosened. The catch-and-release policy put Habib on American soil. The asylum backlog, swollen to historic levels under the prior administration, meant his allegedly fraudulent claim sat unresolved long enough for him to build a life, obtain employment in a sensitive position, and embed himself in the very institutions meant to uphold the law.
DHS did not mince words about the broader implications. In a statement provided to Fox News Digital, the department said:
"Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin ICE is restoring law and order. Illegal aliens have NO PLACE in our communities, especially in positions of law enforcement."
That language is blunt. It is also hard to argue with when the alternative is a system that hands a jail-officer badge to someone who, by the government's own current assessment, should never have been in the country at all.
The personal dimension of this case makes it even more uncomfortable. WIBC reported that Habib married Sheriff Newton's daughter in 2025, the same year he began working at the sheriff's jail. The timeline raises obvious questions that no official has yet answered publicly.
Did the sheriff know his son-in-law had entered the country illegally? Did anyone in the sheriff's office look beyond the E-Verify result? Did the marriage itself raise any internal concern, given that the groom had arrived in the United States only two years earlier under circumstances that are now the subject of a federal fraud allegation?
None of these questions have been addressed on the record. Fox News Digital reported that Newton confirmed Habib's employment but did not elaborate on the vetting process. The sheriff's daughter's name has not been publicly released in the reporting.
This is not the first time the current administration has moved aggressively to hold people accountable when prior oversight failed. But the Habib case stands out because of how deeply an allegedly fraudulent entrant penetrated a law-enforcement institution, not through deception alone, but through a system that practically rolled out the welcome mat.
Habib is currently being held at the Clay County Jail detention facility in Brazil, Indiana, according to Fox News. DHS said he will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings. WIBC reported, citing sources, that Habib is contesting a final deportation order.
The legal fight could drag on. Immigration courts are notoriously backlogged, and contesting a removal order can add months or years to a case. Meanwhile, the fraud allegation surrounding his asylum claim, built on a homosexuality claim in 2023 that is contradicted by a heterosexual marriage in 2025, will presumably be central to the government's case.
There are broader accountability questions that remain open. Did the Biden administration's release policies include any mechanism to flag asylum claims for consistency over time? How many other individuals released at the border obtained work authorization and embedded themselves in sensitive public-sector jobs? And what, if anything, will happen to the local officials who hired Habib without catching what federal agents eventually did?
Cases like this one illustrate why accountability for officials who fail in their duties matters as much as catching the individuals who exploit the gaps. The system did not fail in one place. It failed at every checkpoint.
The Jay County Auditor's Office pointed the finger at the sheriff's department. The sheriff pointed to the documents Habib presented. The documents came from a federal work-authorization system that, by ICE's own admission, does not confer legal status. And the asylum claim that started the whole chain is now called a fraud by the same federal government that accepted it in the first place.
That is not a story about one bad actor slipping through the cracks. It is a story about a system that was deliberately weakened at the top and exploited at every level below.
The residents of Jay County, Indiana, population roughly 21,000, were paying a man's salary to guard their jail who, if DHS is correct, had no legal right to be in the country. He was not some anonymous figure lost in a big-city bureaucracy. He was the sheriff's son-in-law, working in the sheriff's jail, in a small town where everyone knows everyone.
That is what catch-and-release produces. Not just numbers on a chart. Not just abstract policy debates. Real people, in real communities, living with consequences that the architects of those policies never have to face.
When the government itself cannot keep an allegedly fraudulent asylum-seeker out of a corrections uniform, the question is no longer whether the system is broken. The question is who broke it, and whether anyone besides the taxpayers will ever be held to account.
