Kyle Cheney
POLITICO
Mon, August 10, 2026
LONG READ
An immigrant is detained by ICE agents as he exits an immigration courtroom hearing at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York, on June 6, 2025. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
It all started with a two-page memo — a seemingly mundane reinterpretation of a complex immigration law.
Months later, ICE agents whisked away Yair Vargas Torres, shuttling him across three states — and attempting to move him to a fourth — before a federal judge ruled that his detention without bond was illegal. Vargas, who had been granted humanitarian parole in the U.S. in 2022 and settled in Chicago, was separated from his family for 50 days.
Vargas, 31, was able to call his wife about an hour after he was taken into ICE custody. "She was crying, my kids were crying," he said in an interview. "I only had like five minutes with her [on the phone]. I simply told her — take care of the kids."
There are thousands of cases like his — more than 16,000 times in the past year, judges have ruled against ICE's detention tactics. About two-thirds of those rulings stemmed from the policy change in that two-page memo, which broadened the reach of a 1996 detention statute in ways no prior administration had ever attempted.
The flood of cases has stretched the judiciary to a breaking point across the country. Thousands of rulings, from hundreds of judges rushing to respond to the individual cases in front of them, have added up to an overwhelming rebuke of Trump's unprecedented policy.
"The third branch of government is saying no. We're not going to do it this way," U.S. District Judge Fred Biery said in an interview.
POLITICO has reviewed thousands of ICE detention cases and spoken with more than a dozen detainees, lawyers and judges at the heart of this historic controversy. They described the extraordinary strain ICE's policy has placed on the courts, triggering tens of thousands of emergency lawsuits nationwide — each one a race to file and to decide.
"I didn't go into it saying, 'I'm going to free all these people,' but … we've got to get to these cases right now. Get to the cases right away," said Judge Troy Nunley, the chief judge in the Eastern District of California.
Biery and Nunley are among the 469 judges who concluded that the policy contained in the July 8, 2025 ICE memo was an illegal distortion of long-settled detention policy.
Biery's courthouse typically gets 1,500 civil lawsuits a year. This year, they hit 4,000 by May — a deluge driven by the thousands of people locked up — without a chance to plead their case — under a novel legal theory that even President Donald Trump's first administration declined to adopt.
"We've never seen anything like this in my career," the Clinton-appointed judge, who took the bench in 1994, told POLITICO from his San Antonio courthouse.
The Trump administration has defended the new policy and brushed off the courts' overwhelming rejection of it, attributing its losses to "activist judges" and arguing that it'll be vindicated in appeals and by the Supreme Court.
"This administration remains fully determined to carry out the president's immigration priorities," the Justice Department said in a statement to POLITICO. "Legal challenges from activist judges will not deter the Department of Justice from enforcing the law and restoring order to our immigration system."
Asked whether the administration had any concerns about the impact of its mass detention policy on the families of those held by ICE, particularly U.S. citizen spouses and children, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded simply: "No."
The July 8, 2025, two-page memo from ICE's acting director, Todd Lyons, sounded innocuous enough: "Interim Guidance Regarding Detention Authority."
But it was the beginning of an all-out siege on the American justice system — one that would upend tens of thousands of lives, fracture decades of trust between the courts and the Justice Department, overwhelm court dockets in every corner of the country and provoke a lopsided rebuke from judges of every ideological stripe. Soon, it will reach the Supreme Court.
The memo — which would later be endorsed by the Board of Immigration Appeals, the Justice Department-controlled body that binds executive-branch immigration judges — was an effort to erase the due process rights of millions of immigrants who have resided in the U.S. for years, even those without criminal records and people who have attended all of their ICE check-ins or immigration court proceedings.
Vargas was one of them. He said he fled Colombia after the gangs who ran his small town accused him of being an informant for the military. Vargas took his wife, 7-year-old and newborn to Mexico and hired a coyote to shuttle them across the border into the U.S. in 2022. They immediately turned themselves in to immigration authorities and were released with asylum paperwork and an ICE check-in date scheduled for three years later — December 2025.
When he arrived for that check-in, his name was the only one called.
"I remember [an ICE official] telling me that unfortunately, all the people that showed up were going to be detained by ICE, because that was the order from the president of the United States," Vargas recalled.
Then they took him to a detention facility — his first of three, in three states. "That's when the odyssey began," Vargas said.
Until this administration, someone in Vargas' shoes would likely not have been detained at all. And if he was, he first would have been afforded a bond hearing — a chance to prove to an immigration judge that he presents no threat to the public and would attend his immigration proceedings.
Every prior president applied mandatory detention without bond only to people apprehended soon after crossing the border or who were deemed to be dangerous, not for those who had built law-abiding lives — married U.S. citizens, had children, held jobs, paid taxes — since they arrived.
ICE's new memo erased that distinction. Now, even people who had lived in the U.S. for years were treated as though they had just crossed the border and were "seeking" to enter the U.S., no matter where they were apprehended or how many years ago they arrived.
Remir Gutierrez Montiel had been in the U.S. for two years and was employed as an Amazon delivery driver, before ICE agents grabbed him while he was chatting with a neighbor outside their home last September. His wife was cooking breakfast and didn't know what had happened. She filed a missing person's report and didn't hear from him for three days.
Gutierrez fled Venezuela at 16 after participating in student protests against the repressive regime of Nicolás Maduro. After spending years working their way through Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, he and his wife crossed the U.S. border in 2023. They were released on humanitarian parole while they pursued asylum, living quietly in Chicago until agents confronted him.
"We're detaining everyone," Gutierrez recalled the agents telling him when he was detained last September. "Your work permit does not give you status to be here.
Gutierrez recalled his response: "I'm not going to run."
The thousands of similar cases that have landed in federal court over the past year included: the mother of four U.S. citizen children, including a nursing 6-month-old; a father and owner of a roofing company who has lived in Minnesota since 2019 with no criminal record; a 22-year-old, pregnant Mexican woman who had lived in the U.S. since she was 6; and scores more like them.
Gutierrez said he waited two months at a detention facility in Brazil, Indiana, hoping to plead his case to an immigration judge, before ICE officials abruptly awakened him and said, with no explanation, that he was being released. "I thought they were lying. I didn't believe it until I was able to leave," he recalled.
It was his 25th birthday.
Wherever ICE has gone over the past year, mountains of lawsuits have followed. Enforcement surges in Los Angeles and Chicago led to a sharp increase in so-called "habeas petitions" in California and Illinois courts. The opening of Alligator Alcatraz in Florida sent habeas cases surging there. New Jersey has seen an explosion of cases lately, and Texas courts routinely field dozens of new petitions every day.
But nowhere was hit harder than Minnesota. Thousands of federal agents descended on the state this past winter to detain and deport as many targets as possible. Operation Metro Surge drew intense protests that galvanized public opinion against the administration's deportation policy, especially after agents killed two American citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
As tension rose on the streets, a crisis began unfolding in the courts.
"The enormous ramp-up in such a small window of time. I just don't know of a precedent anywhere, at least in modern times," U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, who until July 1 was the chief of Minnesota's federal district court, said in an interview.
Schiltz, an avuncular George W. Bush appointee who clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, said he spent the months of Operation Metro Surge essentially glued to his phone.
Schiltz began staffing his office in shifts so that someone was always available to receive habeas petitions. Biery, too, described the toll on court staff, whom he called the "infantry" of the court system. The goal, both men said, wasn't to simply rubber stamp victories for ICE detainees, but to ensure their claims were considered before it was too late.
"We wanted to make sure they got heard," Schiltz said.
ICE detainees must file habeas petitions in the federal court district where they're being held — a particular challenge because of ICE's penchant for whisking detainees to other states while they seek out lawyers who can locate them and quickly file lawsuits before they're moved again.
"All of our judges, we were up in the wee hours of the morning doing these cases because we had never seen these before. It was all hands on deck," Nunley, an Obama appointee, recalled. And the strain extended to staff, not just judges.
When habeas cases began cresting in Nunley's district, the courts there were already underwater thanks to a shortage of judges and the region's rapidly growing population. The district had four immigration habeas cases in 2021. In May of this year alone, it had 675.
And while many federal judges say they've moved at record speed to respond to detainees' cases, immigrants' lawyers say it varies from courthouse to courthouse. Despite some judges' efforts to adjust and meet this frantic moment, others are more plodding, taking weeks or even months to resolve habeas petitions. In the meantime, immigration courts — which are part of the executive branch — are issuing deportation orders at a blistering pace.
"The immigration judges seem to know they're in a race and the district judges don't," said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an immigration attorney who represents Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man illegally deported by the Trump administration last year.
Sandoval-Moshenberg said his practice has evolved dramatically in the second Trump term. He now has five attorneys dedicated entirely to habeas cases, which used to be rare. His firm guarantees prospective clients that it will file a petition within 24 hours.
Even the Justice Department has struggled to keep up. The Trump administration has bungled or outright defied an extraordinary number of court orders, and has simply thrown in the towel in hundreds of cases. Judges have grown increasingly frustrated and alarmed, distrustful of the Justice Department's representations and increasingly doubtful that ICE is acting in good faith.
"There has been an undeniable move by the Government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights," U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, a Clinton appointee, wrote in January, at the height of Operation Metro Surge.
After it reached a boiling point, Schiltz catalogued more than 90 orders, just from his district, with which ICE had failed to comply. Another judge in New Jersey compelled the Justice Department to make its own catalogue of violated court orders.
Judges have rebuked the administration for violating rules on detaining pregnant or nursing women, drawing upwarrants to justify arrests retroactively, subjecting detainees to flawed or unconstitutional bond hearings, and increasingly deporting people in violation of court orders.
In an age of hyperpartisanship and social media-fueled information silos, judges say courts are an imperfect but rare exception — where facts matter and must be reckoned with.
"The judiciary is the glue that's holding the country together," Schiltz said. "I do believe that's true right now."
The Trump administration has expressed no concern about the courts' extraordinary rejection of its detention policy, attributing those losses to "activist" judges who refuse to let Trump carry out the agenda voters chose.
In the administration's view, articulated by the Justice Department in thousands of habeas cases, the expansion of mandatory detention is an assertion of maximal authority that has been available to — but unused by — every administration since Bill Clinton's. Just because Trump's ICE has opted to exercise this authority doesn't make it illegal, the administration argues.
"This administration's immigration enforcement is about restoring law and order and ensuring our immigration system operates for the safety and benefit of the American people," the Justice Department said in its statement. "The Department of Justice will continue to enforce the law fairly and consistently."
In their view, Congress could not possibly have intended to establish a system in which someone arrested at the border must be detained without bond but someone who had evaded detection for years inside the country couldn't be. Trump administration officials also say prior administrations — especially Biden's — released too many people who would typically have been subject to mandatory detention, granting them humanitarian parole. They cast the new ICE policy as an antidote to Biden's leniency.
About 54 federal district judges across the country have agreed with the administration's position on mandatory detention. That's a small minority, but those judges — about three-quarters of whom are Trump appointees —say the law is simply on the president's side.
When one detainee argued to U.S. District Judge Joshua Divine that the "overwhelming majority" of federal judges had rejected the administration's approach, the Missouri-based Trump appointee had an answer.
"The overwhelming majority of district courts sometimes get the law very wrong," he wrote. "What governs this case is the text of the statute, not what other district courts have concluded."
Responding to written questions from POLITICO, Divine — a Trump appointee confirmed by the Senate a year ago — said he does not mind being in the minority among his colleagues.
"Although I was a new judge, it never bothered me to have to disagree with hundreds of other rulings. My oath demands that I rule according to what I understand the text to say," Divine said. "As a textualist judge, I stress to my clerks never to be afraid to stand alone. Not too long ago, textualism itself was a minority view."
Divine added that he drafted his opinion siding with the administration before surveying the field for contrary views. "As a judge, it's my job to focus on the statutory text that exists," he said. "What policy consequences follow from that text is the concern of Congress and the President."
Divine has seen his view echoed by two federal appeals courts, but six have since gone the other way.
That patchwork of appeals court rulings is the type of split that only the Supreme Court can settle. The Justice Department and ACLU have already asked the justices to intervene. The court could hear a case in its next term.
"The law is on our side," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, citing its record at the Supreme Court on matters restricting asylum and temporary protected status for people the administration is seeking to deport.
"ICE is NOT slowing down."
"Families are scared," said Kelli Stump, an Oklahoma-based immigration lawyer. "They need someone to yell at and they're yelling at me."
"I cry a lot," she said. "I sit there as a human doing what I can do."
Everyone on the receiving end of ICE's amped-up detention philosophy — detainees themselves, their lawyers and the judges who hear their cases — described the past year as both logistically and emotionally draining. Every case is existential for the people being detained as well as their families and communities. That makes the work weightier for both attorneys and judges. And there are more cases than attorneys or judges were ever equipped to handle.
"Some people start shaking in my office when you talk about what they went through," said Todd Pomerleau, a Boston-based immigration attorney who has handled more than 150 habeas cases. "The same stories about the food, how ice cold it was, the lights were on all hours of the day, how they're rattling the cell bars late at night. Making noises, slamming doors. It's almost like everyone has PTSD."
Pomerleau helped spearhead "The Habeas Project," a New England-based coalition that pairs immigration lawyers — who have typically worked in administrative proceedings and immigration courts — with experts in federal litigation.
Nunley, the California-based judge, pulled in judges from Washington, Hawaii and other parts of California to help shoulder some of the habeas caseload. Schiltz, in Minnesota, leaned on judges from Missouri, Nebraska and North Dakota for assistance.
Schiltz and Biery both said they've experienced a surge in threats of violence against judges.
"There were some death threats and stalky emails. 'Who is this old judge, he's senile.' That goes with the territory," Biery said, describing the response to his emotional ruling in the case of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old Minnesota boy whose detention by ICE was captured in a viral photo showing him scared, in a bunny hat on a snowy suburban street with an immigration agent gripping his tiny backpack.
"I've been a judge for 20 years now. We have never had a period of time when we are facing more threats to us, to our safety, to our families, to our staff. It is just an acrid, poisonous atmosphere out there," Schiltz said.
While the legal dispute grinds on, ICE is once again picking up the pace of arrests, which could lead to yet another surge in lawsuits from the people it has detained.
Ankle monitors, arrests and lost jobs: Inside the new realities many Haitians in the US are facing
An immigrant is detained by ICE agents as he exits an immigration courtroom hearing at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York, on June 6, 2025. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
It all started with a two-page memo — a seemingly mundane reinterpretation of a complex immigration law.
Months later, ICE agents whisked away Yair Vargas Torres, shuttling him across three states — and attempting to move him to a fourth — before a federal judge ruled that his detention without bond was illegal. Vargas, who had been granted humanitarian parole in the U.S. in 2022 and settled in Chicago, was separated from his family for 50 days.
Vargas, 31, was able to call his wife about an hour after he was taken into ICE custody. "She was crying, my kids were crying," he said in an interview. "I only had like five minutes with her [on the phone]. I simply told her — take care of the kids."
There are thousands of cases like his — more than 16,000 times in the past year, judges have ruled against ICE's detention tactics. About two-thirds of those rulings stemmed from the policy change in that two-page memo, which broadened the reach of a 1996 detention statute in ways no prior administration had ever attempted.
The flood of cases has stretched the judiciary to a breaking point across the country. Thousands of rulings, from hundreds of judges rushing to respond to the individual cases in front of them, have added up to an overwhelming rebuke of Trump's unprecedented policy.
"The third branch of government is saying no. We're not going to do it this way," U.S. District Judge Fred Biery said in an interview.
POLITICO has reviewed thousands of ICE detention cases and spoken with more than a dozen detainees, lawyers and judges at the heart of this historic controversy. They described the extraordinary strain ICE's policy has placed on the courts, triggering tens of thousands of emergency lawsuits nationwide — each one a race to file and to decide.
"I didn't go into it saying, 'I'm going to free all these people,' but … we've got to get to these cases right now. Get to the cases right away," said Judge Troy Nunley, the chief judge in the Eastern District of California.
Biery and Nunley are among the 469 judges who concluded that the policy contained in the July 8, 2025 ICE memo was an illegal distortion of long-settled detention policy.
Biery's courthouse typically gets 1,500 civil lawsuits a year. This year, they hit 4,000 by May — a deluge driven by the thousands of people locked up — without a chance to plead their case — under a novel legal theory that even President Donald Trump's first administration declined to adopt.
"We've never seen anything like this in my career," the Clinton-appointed judge, who took the bench in 1994, told POLITICO from his San Antonio courthouse.
The Trump administration has defended the new policy and brushed off the courts' overwhelming rejection of it, attributing its losses to "activist judges" and arguing that it'll be vindicated in appeals and by the Supreme Court.
"This administration remains fully determined to carry out the president's immigration priorities," the Justice Department said in a statement to POLITICO. "Legal challenges from activist judges will not deter the Department of Justice from enforcing the law and restoring order to our immigration system."
Asked whether the administration had any concerns about the impact of its mass detention policy on the families of those held by ICE, particularly U.S. citizen spouses and children, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded simply: "No."
The July 8, 2025, two-page memo from ICE's acting director, Todd Lyons, sounded innocuous enough: "Interim Guidance Regarding Detention Authority."
But it was the beginning of an all-out siege on the American justice system — one that would upend tens of thousands of lives, fracture decades of trust between the courts and the Justice Department, overwhelm court dockets in every corner of the country and provoke a lopsided rebuke from judges of every ideological stripe. Soon, it will reach the Supreme Court.
The memo — which would later be endorsed by the Board of Immigration Appeals, the Justice Department-controlled body that binds executive-branch immigration judges — was an effort to erase the due process rights of millions of immigrants who have resided in the U.S. for years, even those without criminal records and people who have attended all of their ICE check-ins or immigration court proceedings.
Vargas was one of them. He said he fled Colombia after the gangs who ran his small town accused him of being an informant for the military. Vargas took his wife, 7-year-old and newborn to Mexico and hired a coyote to shuttle them across the border into the U.S. in 2022. They immediately turned themselves in to immigration authorities and were released with asylum paperwork and an ICE check-in date scheduled for three years later — December 2025.
When he arrived for that check-in, his name was the only one called.
"I remember [an ICE official] telling me that unfortunately, all the people that showed up were going to be detained by ICE, because that was the order from the president of the United States," Vargas recalled.
Then they took him to a detention facility — his first of three, in three states. "That's when the odyssey began," Vargas said.
Until this administration, someone in Vargas' shoes would likely not have been detained at all. And if he was, he first would have been afforded a bond hearing — a chance to prove to an immigration judge that he presents no threat to the public and would attend his immigration proceedings.
Every prior president applied mandatory detention without bond only to people apprehended soon after crossing the border or who were deemed to be dangerous, not for those who had built law-abiding lives — married U.S. citizens, had children, held jobs, paid taxes — since they arrived.
ICE's new memo erased that distinction. Now, even people who had lived in the U.S. for years were treated as though they had just crossed the border and were "seeking" to enter the U.S., no matter where they were apprehended or how many years ago they arrived.
Remir Gutierrez Montiel had been in the U.S. for two years and was employed as an Amazon delivery driver, before ICE agents grabbed him while he was chatting with a neighbor outside their home last September. His wife was cooking breakfast and didn't know what had happened. She filed a missing person's report and didn't hear from him for three days.
Gutierrez fled Venezuela at 16 after participating in student protests against the repressive regime of Nicolás Maduro. After spending years working their way through Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, he and his wife crossed the U.S. border in 2023. They were released on humanitarian parole while they pursued asylum, living quietly in Chicago until agents confronted him.
"We're detaining everyone," Gutierrez recalled the agents telling him when he was detained last September. "Your work permit does not give you status to be here.
Gutierrez recalled his response: "I'm not going to run."
The thousands of similar cases that have landed in federal court over the past year included: the mother of four U.S. citizen children, including a nursing 6-month-old; a father and owner of a roofing company who has lived in Minnesota since 2019 with no criminal record; a 22-year-old, pregnant Mexican woman who had lived in the U.S. since she was 6; and scores more like them.
Gutierrez said he waited two months at a detention facility in Brazil, Indiana, hoping to plead his case to an immigration judge, before ICE officials abruptly awakened him and said, with no explanation, that he was being released. "I thought they were lying. I didn't believe it until I was able to leave," he recalled.
It was his 25th birthday.
Wherever ICE has gone over the past year, mountains of lawsuits have followed. Enforcement surges in Los Angeles and Chicago led to a sharp increase in so-called "habeas petitions" in California and Illinois courts. The opening of Alligator Alcatraz in Florida sent habeas cases surging there. New Jersey has seen an explosion of cases lately, and Texas courts routinely field dozens of new petitions every day.
But nowhere was hit harder than Minnesota. Thousands of federal agents descended on the state this past winter to detain and deport as many targets as possible. Operation Metro Surge drew intense protests that galvanized public opinion against the administration's deportation policy, especially after agents killed two American citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
As tension rose on the streets, a crisis began unfolding in the courts.
"The enormous ramp-up in such a small window of time. I just don't know of a precedent anywhere, at least in modern times," U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, who until July 1 was the chief of Minnesota's federal district court, said in an interview.
Schiltz, an avuncular George W. Bush appointee who clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, said he spent the months of Operation Metro Surge essentially glued to his phone.
Schiltz began staffing his office in shifts so that someone was always available to receive habeas petitions. Biery, too, described the toll on court staff, whom he called the "infantry" of the court system. The goal, both men said, wasn't to simply rubber stamp victories for ICE detainees, but to ensure their claims were considered before it was too late.
"We wanted to make sure they got heard," Schiltz said.
ICE detainees must file habeas petitions in the federal court district where they're being held — a particular challenge because of ICE's penchant for whisking detainees to other states while they seek out lawyers who can locate them and quickly file lawsuits before they're moved again.
"All of our judges, we were up in the wee hours of the morning doing these cases because we had never seen these before. It was all hands on deck," Nunley, an Obama appointee, recalled. And the strain extended to staff, not just judges.
When habeas cases began cresting in Nunley's district, the courts there were already underwater thanks to a shortage of judges and the region's rapidly growing population. The district had four immigration habeas cases in 2021. In May of this year alone, it had 675.
And while many federal judges say they've moved at record speed to respond to detainees' cases, immigrants' lawyers say it varies from courthouse to courthouse. Despite some judges' efforts to adjust and meet this frantic moment, others are more plodding, taking weeks or even months to resolve habeas petitions. In the meantime, immigration courts — which are part of the executive branch — are issuing deportation orders at a blistering pace.
"The immigration judges seem to know they're in a race and the district judges don't," said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an immigration attorney who represents Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man illegally deported by the Trump administration last year.
Sandoval-Moshenberg said his practice has evolved dramatically in the second Trump term. He now has five attorneys dedicated entirely to habeas cases, which used to be rare. His firm guarantees prospective clients that it will file a petition within 24 hours.
Even the Justice Department has struggled to keep up. The Trump administration has bungled or outright defied an extraordinary number of court orders, and has simply thrown in the towel in hundreds of cases. Judges have grown increasingly frustrated and alarmed, distrustful of the Justice Department's representations and increasingly doubtful that ICE is acting in good faith.
"There has been an undeniable move by the Government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights," U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, a Clinton appointee, wrote in January, at the height of Operation Metro Surge.
After it reached a boiling point, Schiltz catalogued more than 90 orders, just from his district, with which ICE had failed to comply. Another judge in New Jersey compelled the Justice Department to make its own catalogue of violated court orders.
Judges have rebuked the administration for violating rules on detaining pregnant or nursing women, drawing upwarrants to justify arrests retroactively, subjecting detainees to flawed or unconstitutional bond hearings, and increasingly deporting people in violation of court orders.
In an age of hyperpartisanship and social media-fueled information silos, judges say courts are an imperfect but rare exception — where facts matter and must be reckoned with.
"The judiciary is the glue that's holding the country together," Schiltz said. "I do believe that's true right now."
The Trump administration has expressed no concern about the courts' extraordinary rejection of its detention policy, attributing those losses to "activist" judges who refuse to let Trump carry out the agenda voters chose.
In the administration's view, articulated by the Justice Department in thousands of habeas cases, the expansion of mandatory detention is an assertion of maximal authority that has been available to — but unused by — every administration since Bill Clinton's. Just because Trump's ICE has opted to exercise this authority doesn't make it illegal, the administration argues.
"This administration's immigration enforcement is about restoring law and order and ensuring our immigration system operates for the safety and benefit of the American people," the Justice Department said in its statement. "The Department of Justice will continue to enforce the law fairly and consistently."
In their view, Congress could not possibly have intended to establish a system in which someone arrested at the border must be detained without bond but someone who had evaded detection for years inside the country couldn't be. Trump administration officials also say prior administrations — especially Biden's — released too many people who would typically have been subject to mandatory detention, granting them humanitarian parole. They cast the new ICE policy as an antidote to Biden's leniency.
About 54 federal district judges across the country have agreed with the administration's position on mandatory detention. That's a small minority, but those judges — about three-quarters of whom are Trump appointees —say the law is simply on the president's side.
When one detainee argued to U.S. District Judge Joshua Divine that the "overwhelming majority" of federal judges had rejected the administration's approach, the Missouri-based Trump appointee had an answer.
"The overwhelming majority of district courts sometimes get the law very wrong," he wrote. "What governs this case is the text of the statute, not what other district courts have concluded."
Responding to written questions from POLITICO, Divine — a Trump appointee confirmed by the Senate a year ago — said he does not mind being in the minority among his colleagues.
"Although I was a new judge, it never bothered me to have to disagree with hundreds of other rulings. My oath demands that I rule according to what I understand the text to say," Divine said. "As a textualist judge, I stress to my clerks never to be afraid to stand alone. Not too long ago, textualism itself was a minority view."
Divine added that he drafted his opinion siding with the administration before surveying the field for contrary views. "As a judge, it's my job to focus on the statutory text that exists," he said. "What policy consequences follow from that text is the concern of Congress and the President."
Divine has seen his view echoed by two federal appeals courts, but six have since gone the other way.
That patchwork of appeals court rulings is the type of split that only the Supreme Court can settle. The Justice Department and ACLU have already asked the justices to intervene. The court could hear a case in its next term.
"The law is on our side," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, citing its record at the Supreme Court on matters restricting asylum and temporary protected status for people the administration is seeking to deport.
"ICE is NOT slowing down."
"Families are scared," said Kelli Stump, an Oklahoma-based immigration lawyer. "They need someone to yell at and they're yelling at me."
"I cry a lot," she said. "I sit there as a human doing what I can do."
Everyone on the receiving end of ICE's amped-up detention philosophy — detainees themselves, their lawyers and the judges who hear their cases — described the past year as both logistically and emotionally draining. Every case is existential for the people being detained as well as their families and communities. That makes the work weightier for both attorneys and judges. And there are more cases than attorneys or judges were ever equipped to handle.
"Some people start shaking in my office when you talk about what they went through," said Todd Pomerleau, a Boston-based immigration attorney who has handled more than 150 habeas cases. "The same stories about the food, how ice cold it was, the lights were on all hours of the day, how they're rattling the cell bars late at night. Making noises, slamming doors. It's almost like everyone has PTSD."
Pomerleau helped spearhead "The Habeas Project," a New England-based coalition that pairs immigration lawyers — who have typically worked in administrative proceedings and immigration courts — with experts in federal litigation.
Nunley, the California-based judge, pulled in judges from Washington, Hawaii and other parts of California to help shoulder some of the habeas caseload. Schiltz, in Minnesota, leaned on judges from Missouri, Nebraska and North Dakota for assistance.
Schiltz and Biery both said they've experienced a surge in threats of violence against judges.
"There were some death threats and stalky emails. 'Who is this old judge, he's senile.' That goes with the territory," Biery said, describing the response to his emotional ruling in the case of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old Minnesota boy whose detention by ICE was captured in a viral photo showing him scared, in a bunny hat on a snowy suburban street with an immigration agent gripping his tiny backpack.
"I've been a judge for 20 years now. We have never had a period of time when we are facing more threats to us, to our safety, to our families, to our staff. It is just an acrid, poisonous atmosphere out there," Schiltz said.
While the legal dispute grinds on, ICE is once again picking up the pace of arrests, which could lead to yet another surge in lawsuits from the people it has detained.
Ankle monitors, arrests and lost jobs: Inside the new realities many Haitians in the US are facing
Catherine E. Shoichet,
CNN
Mon, August 10, 2026
Mon, August 10, 2026
After receiving an ankle monitor during a check-in Sunday at an ICE field office in Blue Ash, Ohio, Haitian immigrant Monsanto Maler became emotional and collapsed outside. Now that a Supreme Court decision has cleared the way for the end of their deportation protections, advocates say many Haitians have been required to wear the ankle monitors. "It's so humiliating," says Vilès Dorsainvil of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, one of the men comforting Maler in this photo. - Carol Guzy
A nurse who's no longer allowed to work at one of the city's top hospitals hunkered down in her Boston home, afraid ICE could be in the neighborhood.
A man in Ohio collapsed to the ground in tears after leaving an ICE check-in wearing an ankle monitor.
And residents in eastern Maryland came upon a jarring sight: cars left behind at gas stations with their engines still running.
"They've been arresting people left and right — some people in the middle of the streets. … We have people who went to the grocery store to cook for their kids and didn't return home," said Dr. Marie D. Fouché, founder and executive director of Safe Harbor Circles, an organization in Salisbury, Maryland, that provides support to immigrants.
In the weeks since the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end deportation protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians, and in the days since a lower court judge took a key legal step that made it official, a new reality has started to come into focus in communities that had been holding out hope for a last-minute reprieve.
Fear and confusion are widespread among former holders of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, who had been allowed to work legally in the United States for years as part of the program and suddenly find themselves vulnerable to detention and deportation.
"Now we have no protection," said Vilès Dorsainvil, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield. "Anything can happen any time."
Co-Founder and Executive Director of Haitian Community Help and Support Center Vilès Dorsainvil says many have felt humiliated by the ankle monitors authorities are now issuing. "These are things that should be put on criminals," he says.
- Jim Vondruska/REUTERS/REUTERS
Federal authorities have been tight-lipped about details of this phase in the administration's immigration crackdown, repeatedly stating that they won't discuss ongoing or future operations. They haven't released data about how many Haitians have been detained since TPS ended. And as of Saturday, advocates who closely track deportation flights hadn't logged any bound for Haiti in the past two weeks.
But Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last week that operations targeting Haitian TPS holders were underway.
"We're going after them right now. … These individuals can either self-deport, or we will arrest you and send you back. It's that simple," he told NewsNation on Tuesday.
Enforcement targeting former TPS holders, including Haitians, kicked up in late July and is expected to be ongoing, two sources with knowledge of the operations told CNN.
At least five people contacted the Haitian Bridge Alliance advocacy organization last week reporting loved ones who were detained across the US, according to Guerline Jozef, the organization's executive director. Callers reported arrests of former TPS holders, who often were driving when they crossed paths with ICE, in Arizona, California, Indiana and Maryland, she said.
"The fear is that the numbers will increase. Enforcement always happens, even when we don't hear it on the news. It is happening on a daily basis within the community," she said.
Letters leave a community on edge
Residents of one of the nation's most recent — and well known — Haitian enclaves say they haven't yet seen an increase in ICE arrests. Springfield drew national attention after President Donald Trump baselessly accused Haitians there of eating pets during a campaign debate in 2024. And some have speculated that the Midwestern city and its some 15,000 Haitians residents would be a focus of arrests after TPS ended.
Leaders in Springfield say the growing ICE presence many fear hasn't yet materialized. Hundreds of Department of Homeland Security letters arriving in the mail, however, have put the community on edge.
Federal authorities have been tight-lipped about details of this phase in the administration's immigration crackdown, repeatedly stating that they won't discuss ongoing or future operations. They haven't released data about how many Haitians have been detained since TPS ended. And as of Saturday, advocates who closely track deportation flights hadn't logged any bound for Haiti in the past two weeks.
But Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last week that operations targeting Haitian TPS holders were underway.
"We're going after them right now. … These individuals can either self-deport, or we will arrest you and send you back. It's that simple," he told NewsNation on Tuesday.
Enforcement targeting former TPS holders, including Haitians, kicked up in late July and is expected to be ongoing, two sources with knowledge of the operations told CNN.
At least five people contacted the Haitian Bridge Alliance advocacy organization last week reporting loved ones who were detained across the US, according to Guerline Jozef, the organization's executive director. Callers reported arrests of former TPS holders, who often were driving when they crossed paths with ICE, in Arizona, California, Indiana and Maryland, she said.
"The fear is that the numbers will increase. Enforcement always happens, even when we don't hear it on the news. It is happening on a daily basis within the community," she said.
Letters leave a community on edge
Residents of one of the nation's most recent — and well known — Haitian enclaves say they haven't yet seen an increase in ICE arrests. Springfield drew national attention after President Donald Trump baselessly accused Haitians there of eating pets during a campaign debate in 2024. And some have speculated that the Midwestern city and its some 15,000 Haitians residents would be a focus of arrests after TPS ended.
Leaders in Springfield say the growing ICE presence many fear hasn't yet materialized. Hundreds of Department of Homeland Security letters arriving in the mail, however, have put the community on edge.
The streets of Little Haiti in Brooklyn, New York, have been noticeably quieter since the recent end of protections that allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians to work legally in the US. - Ryan Murphy/AFP/Getty ImagesMore
"Please come to the office listed below at the time and place indicated in connection with an official matter," the letters read, according to a copy Dorsainvil shared with CNN.
Those who've reported to ICE offices after receiving the notices have been outfitted with ankle monitors that allow authorities to track their location, Dorsainvil says, and many have been assigned court dates in about a month.
The ankle monitors are part of a frequently used ICE program known as "alternatives to detention." But Dorsainvil says for many Haitians in Springfield, the devices evoke the painful history of shackles worn during slavery, and that he and other advocates unsuccessfully attempted to convince authorities the monitors weren't necessary.
Now, he says, many Haitians find themselves facing not only the social pressures of being unable to work and provide for their families, but also the psychological pressure of dehumanizing treatment.
"It's so…humiliating," he says.
Philbert Viaud, a Haitian resident of Columbus, Ohio, departs an ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations field office with an ankle monitor after an appointment in Cincinnati on August 2. - Carolyn Kaster/AP
Photos and video captured by journalists outside an ICE office in Blue Ash, Ohio, on Sunday showed a man who was overcome with emotion after leaving with a monitor on his left ankle. Monsanto Maler has lived in the US since 2023 and said he left Haiti because he didn't feel safe, according to photojournalist Carol Guzy, who photographed Maler collapsing in tears as Dorsainvil comforted him.
"He was confused," Dorsainvil says. "He was asking us how long he would need to wear it. We couldn't answer this."
The letters and ankle monitors have exacerbated an already tense situation, says Marjory Wentworth, a board member of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center who also works with G92, a faith-based organization advocating for immigrants in the community.
"It's terrifying… the emotional and psychological stress on these individuals and these families," she said.
And it's hard to know what to do to help, Wentworth says. On Sunday morning, she says, crowds of demonstrators stood outside the ICE office in Blue Ash, chanting "immigrants are welcome here" and singing "We Shall Overcome" to show support to Haitians who had check-ins that morning.
"These people are from our community, and they need to know that we care," Wentworth said.
Asked about the letters and ankle monitors, a DHS spokesperson told CNN that TPS was always intended to be temporary and invoked the administration's self-deportation program, which offers stipends to undocumented immigrants who choose to leave the country.
"What we would say now is it's closing time which means you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," the spokesperson said. "The good news is it's not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home."
This nurse says returning to Haiti isn't an option
But a 29-year-old nurse in Boston told CNN that returning to Haiti now is out of the question for her and many others who fled the Caribbean nation after a devastating earthquake in 2010 only to watch in horror from afar as gang violence has made the country increasingly dangerous.
"There are no jobs. Most of the hospitals are taken over by gangs or have been destroyed, and … the economy's not good. We don't have leaders or a government. It's just very unsafe," said the nurse, who asked to remain anonymous because now, without TPS, she fears for her safety.
She's spent more than half of her life in the US and has been working as a nurse at one of Boston's top hospitals for eight years until last week, when she was forced to take a leave of absence after her work permit expired.
Dealing with the possible end of TPS ever since the Trump administration first announced its termination, she says, has been like going through a never-ending cycle of the stages of grief.
An attendee holds a sign during a rally at Brooklyn Borough Hall in New York, on July 9. Protesters called for Congress to pass a measure that would extend TPS for Haitians. - Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images
"I've gotten angry, I've been in denial, I've been frustrated…and every time I think that, 'OK, I'm accepting that this is it, this is the reality,' you go back through it again," she says. "I feel like this thing has been hanging over my head for years. And I've tried to find a proper pathway to get me out of it, but it just feels like there wasn't one."
These days, she's focusing her efforts on looking for nursing jobs abroad, and hoping another country will give her a chance to use the skills she trained so hard to learn before immigration crackdowns in the US intensify further.
"They're losing a lot of us — a lot of people like me. We're willing to work. We're ready. We work very hard, and it feels like we're not needed, we're not valued, and all our years of service have gone (unnoticed)," she says.
'Affecting the economy, big time'
Many businesses have been devastated by the loss of Haitian employees in recent weeks, according to Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition.
The organization represents CEOs and associations in manufacturing, healthcare, elder care, construction, agriculture and hospitality. And Shi says at least two of its members were particularly hard hit by the end of TPS for Haitians: a resort hotel in Florida that lost more than 150 workers, and a senior center in Massachusetts that lost more than 50 employees.
It's already having ripple effects, she says, noting that some nursing homes are now considering closing wings because they're short-staffed after losing so many workers.
"The American workers that are on the team are not just missing their colleagues and team members, but also they're burning out. They're carrying way more extra load because a quarter of the workforce is gone," she said.
Advocates and local leaders say they've been observing the absence of Haitians on the streets of many communities, too.
In Salisbury, which has become a hub for Haitians who work in nearby factories and farms, ICE recently started detaining people in parking lots and other areas immigrants frequent, according to Fouché of Safe Harbor Circles.
The uptick in arrests prompted many Haitians to go into hiding, she says. "People are not coming out."
Members of the Word of Life Center, a church and hub of the Haitian community, sing and pray August 2 during a service in Salisbury, Maryland. - Luis Andres Henao/AP
The streets in Haitian neighborhoods of New York City have also been noticeably quieter. David Duchatellier says business has plunged at his travel agency in Cambria Heights, which also provides money transfer services.
"You don't see people walking around as they used to. They're staying inside because they're not working. They're not going to the supermarket to buy food. And that's affecting the economy, big time," he says.
A Haitian American who's lived in the US for more than 50 years, Duchatellier says he's been writing to members of Congress to urge them to come up with a legislative compromise to help Haitians, and he hopes Trump's advisers will tell him how much a crackdown on Haitians will harm the US economy.
"You didn't cause this, but you can solve it, once and for all. … Nobody's giving him this advice right now. I wish I could just sit with him for just five minutes," Duchatellier says.
There's still an opening for the administration to change course, he says.
A Honduran woman poses for a portrait outside a Perdue Farms poultry plant in Salisbury, Maryland, where she worked for more than two decades before losing her job last year after her TPS expired. - Luis Andres Henao/APMore
But many seem to be running out of hope.
Fielding a growing number of calls from Haitians unsure of where to turn is overwhelming, says Judith Polidor, who works as a paralegal in Brooklyn's Little Haiti neighborhood.
"It's sadness all day. … They are crying. … Everybody has an emergency. … They need somebody just to listen," she says, "even though you cannot do nothing."
CNN's Priscilla Alvarez, Sharif Paget, Shimon Prokupecz, Linh Tran, Maria Santana, Hira Humayun, Hyan de Frietas, Kaanita Iyer and Caitlin Stephen Hu contributed to this report.
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