More than 18,000 habeas petitions challenge the Trump administration’s detention policies, with judges nationwide pushing back.
The Trump administration’s push for mass deportations has resulted in more than 18,000 challenges in federal court from immigrants claiming their detention is illegal, more than were filed under the last three administrations combined — including President Donald Trump’s first term.
So far this year, immigrants are filing on average more than 200 of these cases, known as habeas petitions, daily across the country, with California and Texas accounting for about 40% of new cases, a ProPublica analysis of federal court filings found. To keep tabs on this historical rise, ProPublica is publishing a habeas case tracker.
“I don’t recall a time that anything like this has ever happened,” said Daniel Caudillo, director of the Immigration Law Clinic at Texas Tech University School of Law and a recently departed immigration judge.
The wave of habeas petitions comes in response to new administration policies aimed at ramping up the number of deportations. Among those are policies that require the majority of immigrants who entered the country illegally to remain in detention while their immigration cases are proceeding.
Lawyers say these policies upend decades of legal precedent that previously allowed immigrants who had been in the country for years and posed no security or flight risk a chance to remain in their communities until an immigration judge could determine whether they could stay in the country legally.
On Friday night, a divided three-judge panel in the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit sided with the administration in limiting bond hearings to immigrants who entered the country lawfully. Caudillo called the decision “devastating,” adding that as a result, most immigrants held in states that fall under the circuit, which includes Texas, will now be subject to mandatory detention. Appeals of judges’ rulings in habeas cases challenging immigrants’ detention have been filed in nine of the 12 regional appeals courts, meaning the question could ultimately find its way to the Supreme Court.
A large majority of federal judges who’ve ruled on the habeas petitions so far are siding with immigrants. A recent analysis by Politico found that over 300 judges have ruled against the administration’s new detention policies, while only 14 have upheld them. The result is that federal judges frequently are ordering the government to either release immigrants from detention or offer them a bond hearing before an immigration judge to determine whether they are eligible for release while their immigration case proceeds.
