‘We’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’: ICE’s Detention Crackdown Swamps the Courts

It all started with a two-page memo — a seemingly mundane reinterpretation of a complex immigration law.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 up warrants to justify arrests retroactively, subjecting detainees to flawed or unconstitutional bond hearings, and increasingly deporting people in violation of court orders.

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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.

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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.”

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