Judge puts Trump's immigration regime on ice with major rebuke: lawyer

Robert Davis
May 13, 2026 
RAW STORY


A member of the Special Response Team (SRT) holds his weapons at a protest against the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, during a rally against increased immigration enforcement across the city outside the Whipple Building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S., January 8, 2026. REUTERS/Tim Evans/File Photo

A judge appointed by President Donald Trump just put the president's immigration regime on ice with a major rebuke, according to one lawyer.

Recently, a federal appeals court in New York ruled that the Trump administration's policy of detaining suspected illegal immigrants without bond is illegal. The judge in the case, Joseph F. Bianco, who was appointed to the bench by Trump during his first administration, ruled that the administration's "government’s novel interpretation of the immigration statute defies their plain text" and ordered the administration to provide bond hearings for the detainees.

Shant Karnikian, a lawyer and host of the "Civil Action" podcast on the Legal AF Network, said in a new episode that the ruling is a "major loss" for the administration.


"When your own nominee writes the majority opinion rejecting your policy as the broadest mass deportation without bond mandate in American history, that's not just a legal setback. It's a major, major loss for the Trump administration," Karnikian said.

The Trump administration has faced mounting legal challenges over its immigration detention practices, including holding U.S. citizens and legal residents without due process, deporting individuals to third countries without notice, and circumventing habeas corpus protections.

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration, which has defied or slow-walked several judicial orders.

The case in New York stemmed from a Trump administration policy that reclassified long-term residents who entered without being screened as being eligible for deportation. In turn, they were detained without a bond hearing.

However, that plan relied on what Karnikian described as "legal fiction" that long-term residents are still "seeking admission" to the country. That ruling could be used to squash future detentions of a similar kind.

"It's a fiction," he said. "I mean, you can't do that. You can't have it like kind of retroactively treat them, look at their history, and go, 'Well, he was seeking admission at one point.'"