How
ICE defies judges’ orders to release detainees, step by step
A POLITICO review of
hundreds of cases brought by ICE detainees shows a pattern of noncompliance
that has frustrated judges across the country.
By Kyle Cheney02/10/2026 05:00 AM EST
Courts across the country
have overwhelmingly rejected the Trump administration’s effort to round up
thousands of immigrants and lock them up without a chance for bond — even if
they have no criminal records and have lived in the United States for years.
But the Trump
administration has slow-walked or outright defied judges’ orders demanding
the release of people scooped up by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement at an increasingly rapid clip.
Sometimes, ICE has raced
detainees across state lines in ways judges say are designed to thwart legal
proceedings. Other times, they’re detaining people for days or weeks after
judges have ordered them released. ICE officials have at times ignored other
arms of the federal government trying to ensure compliance with court orders.
And sometimes the administration has given judges bad or incomplete
information.
A POLITICO review of
hundreds of cases brought by ICE detainees across the country shows judges
increasingly furious and exhausted by the Trump administration’s tactics.
“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 from Minnesota, said in a recent order.
As a result, judges have
issued more detailed and
prescriptive orders to head off potential loopholes or
hair-splitting results. And when all else fails, they threaten to hold administration officials in contempt.
Asked about the deepening
conflict with courts, Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin reissued
previous statements criticizing “activist judges” for trying to “thwart
President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.”
The statement didn’t directly address judges’ complaints about their orders
being violated.
These issues have
reached a crescendo in Minnesota,
where the administration’s deportation hammer has fallen hardest in recent
weeks, flooding the courts and overwhelming even the Trump Justice
Department’s own attorneys.
Here’s how the
administration’s noncompliance plays out:
ICE whisks people out of state
People fighting for
release from federal custody must, in nearly all cases, sue in the district
where they’re being held — even if it’s not where they were arrested or where
they are from.
But that gets complicated
when ICE rushes detainees out of state and bounces them around
the country while they’re attempting to hire lawyers or decide where to file
lawsuits. Judges have tried to counter this by issuing quick orders barring transfers outside
of their districts. But that has been met with halting success.
And judges across the country have repeatedly rapped the Trump
administration for using these transfers as a way to stymie
meritorious habeas corpus petitions, a legal right to due process allowing
people to challenge detention by the government.
“These practices are
deeply concerning and generally suggest that ICE is attempting to hide the
location of detainees, and thus, make habeas proceedings more difficult for a
petitioner and their counsel,” said Donovan Frank, a Clinton-appointed judge in
Minnesota, who deemed the tactic a
“pattern of obfuscation.”
Other judges have raised
similar alarms. U.S. District Judge John Gerrard, an Obama appointee based in
Nebraska who is helping handle a backlog of Minnesota cases scolded the Trump
administration for an effort “to frustrate judicial review by
moving detainees around the country repeatedly.”
In a particularly dramatic
case, ICE detained a 19-year-old woman on Jan. 14 — the night she
witnessed an alleged assault on
a federal agent that resulted in an agent shooting a man in the leg — and
quickly transported her to Texas and then New Mexico, frustrating her
attorney’s attempt to file a habeas petition in Minnesota. Her
attorney then raced to file petitions in her other two known locations to
ensure they were lodged before she could be deported. ICE moved her despite a
Minnesota judge’s order to bar her deportation because
of her potential testimony in the criminal case.
The saga ended late
Thursday when a federal judge in New Mexico — who had already deemed the Trump
administration’s mass detention practices illegal in other cases — ordered the woman’s
immediate return to Minnesota and release from custody. The
reason: Her 1-year-old son, whom she was separated from while in detention, was
badly burned and required emergency surgery.
Remarkably, another man
from the same building as the woman was arrested that night as well and shipped
quickly to Texas, first El Paso then San Antonio. In that case, another judge
ripped the administration’s rapid-fire transfers and ordered the man returned
and released.
When detainees sue, DOJ crawls
It’s become an epidemic —
not only in Minnesota but across the country.
An overwhelmed Justice Department has simply blown off court-ordered deadlines
to respond to habeas petitions or defend its detention decisions.
In some cases, the missed deadlines have
resulted in orders to immediately release detainees from ICE custody — even from judges
who previously sided with
the administration’s underlying mass detention policies.
The Justice Department
said in a statement that it is complying with court orders and enforcing
federal immigration law: “If rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating
cases and respected the Government’s obligation to properly prepare cases,
there wouldn’t be an ‘overwhelming’ habeas caseload or concern over following
orders.”
When detainees win release, ICE delays
The most acute concern
from judges has been a recent surge of violations that occur after judges have ordered ICE to release people.
In a growing number of cases, ICE has taken days or weeks to comply, sometimes
requiring emergency motions by detainees’ lawyers and contempt threats from
judges.
“Detention without lawful
authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that
unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify
it,” U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell, a Biden appointee based in Minnesota,
said during a hearing Tuesday. “The individuals affected are people. The
overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this Court have been found to be
lawfully present as of now in the country. They live in their communities. Some
are separated from their families.”
The Justice Department has
repeatedly cited failed efforts to communicate with their ICE counterparts to
carry out court orders and the fact that they are drowning in habeas cases
driven by the Trump administration’s mass deportation strategy. But the delayed
releases also add to the burdens on the court system and lawyers for detainees.
Minnesota’s chief federal
judge, Patrick Schiltz, cited these delayed
releases in a public rebuke of the Trump administration’s
conduct. The George W. Bush appointee had threatened to haul ICE chief Todd
Lyons into court on Jan. 30, only to rescind the demand once the administration
released a man he had ordered released a week earlier.
Detainees released without belongings, devices or documents
In recent days, judges in
Minnesota have expressed
frustration that even when complying with their orders, ICE has
been doing so in bad faith. Detainees that the agency had whisked to Texas, for
example, were being released far from home with no way to contact loved ones or
lawyers, and sometimes without their phones,
documents or other possessions.
U.S. District Judge John
Tunheim, a Minnesota-based Clinton appointee, recently included a requirement that
a released detainee should not be “left outside in dangerous cold” and
emphasized that ICE should coordinate the release with a detainee’s lawyer to
“ensure humane treatment.”
Frank recently required that
if ICE ultimately released a detainee, they must do so: “(1) in Minnesota; (2)
with all personal documents and belongings, such as his driver’s license,
passport, other immigration documents, and cell phone; (3) without conditions
such as ankle monitors or tracking devices; and (4) with all clothing and
outerwear he was wearing at the time of detention, or other proper winter
attire.”
After a released detainee
complained that ICE withheld his crucial documents and identification after
releasing him from a Texas facility, U.S. District Judge Susan Nelson, a
Minnesota-based Obama appointee, went as far as personally monitoring a
UPS tracking number to ensure that the man’s belongings were
returned to him. “It appears that the file was delivered today, February 6, 2026, at 9:50 a.m.,
and was received by a person named ‘Brian,” Nelson wrote in a Saturday order.
Blackwell said the
increasingly specific conditions judges were applying to their release orders
were responsive to hair splitting by the administration.
“If we say, release the
person immediately, then we learn that, having transported him to El Paso or
New Mexico, you don’t bring him back. We learn that somebody is put out on the
street with just the clothes on their backs and have to figure out how to get
back here when they should not have been arrested here in the first place, let
alone flown halfway across the continent of North America,” Blackwell said in
the Tuesday hearing.
“All right, so you brought
them back,” he continued. “We can’t have them released when it’s minus 14
outside. And so now we have to address that. Don’t release them in the
circumstances that might endanger their health or safety.”
ICE monitors people in defiance of judges’ release orders
Even when ICE releases
someone — in the right place and with their belongings — the story isn’t over.
Judges have bristled at indications that ICE is also imposing “conditions of
release” on detainees they ruled should never have been
arrested in the first place.
Those conditions, akin to
what criminal defendants face when they await trial, can include GPS monitoring
and other restrictions on their liberty. Judges say that these conditions are
violations of their orders to return released detainees to the status quo
before their arrest.
“As this Court has
observed now on too many occasions, [administration officials] continue to
advance legal positions that are indefensible and illogical,” U.S. District
Judge Christine O’Hearn, a New Jersey-based Biden appointee, wrote in a recent order.
“This was not a misunderstanding or lack of clarity; it was knowing and
purposeful.”
U.S. District Judge
Charlotte Sweeney, a Colorado-based Biden appointee, ordered the release of
a man who was placed on improper conditions — and then re-arrested for
purportedly violating them. The judge lamented the repeated rulings she’d had
to issue rejecting the administration’s legal positions on matters of mass
detention.
“While Respondents get to
repeat themselves, they don’t get to repeatedly violate Petitioner’s due
process rights,” she wrote.
McLaughlin did not respond
to the complaint by judges that monitoring conditions were violations of their
orders, but she said the use of ankle monitors were “an enforcement tool that
helps ICE ensure illegal aliens comply with removal proceedings.”
“Any illegal alien who is
worried about having to wear an ankle monitor or any other GPS devices should
accept the $2,600 stipend from the U.S. government and free flight home by
self-deporting through the CBP Home App,” she said.
When a court-ordered bond hearing isn’t enough
More recently, judges who
have ordered the administration to hold bond hearings for detainees before an
immigration court — administered by the executive branch rather than the
judiciary — have been frustrated to learn that those bond hearings were, effectively,
stacked against detainees from the start.
Administration officials
“may not shield their unlawful arrest of Petitioner by hiding behind an
[immigration judge]’s conclusory, two-line determination of flight risk,” U.S.
District Judge Pamela Chen, a New York-based Obama appointee, wrote in a Feb. 4 decision.
U.S. District Judge Max
Cogburn, an Obama appointee based in Charlotte, ruled Wednesday that
a bond hearing he ordered in December turned out to be constitutionally
deficient. The immigration judge in the case, he said, failed to permit the
detainee to offer evidence in support of his release and relied on
uncorroborated claims to support his continued detention.
Cogburn ordered a new bond
hearing for the man, saying his original order had “presupposed that this
hearing would be conducted in accordance with Petitioner’s due process rights.
It was not.”
And U.S. District Judge
John McConnell, an Obama appointee in Rhode Island, ordered a man freed Monday
after concluding that two bond hearings conducted by immigration judges were
constitutionally deficient — including one in which a judge ordered the man
detained as a danger to the community over an uncorroborated report that the
man drove 90-mph in a 55-mph zone.
Errors abound in habeas cases
Above all else has
been a parade of mistakes:
crucial attachments left off court filings or filled with incorrect
information, claims that detainees are being housed in one
state only to learn they were
in another.
But the mistakes are at
their most severe when they lead to deportations in violation of court orders.
Judge Jill Parrish, the chief federal judge in Utah, recently confronted this when
the administration acknowledged shuttling a man to Wyoming and deporting him to
Mexico despite her order to block his immediate deportation.
“When a court exercises
jurisdiction over a petitioner’s claims, Respondents may not ‘deport first,
litigate later,’” the Obama appointee wrote.
It’s happened a handful of times in recent months.
And the administration has, at times, facilitated their return to
ensure they receive due process.
In another recent case,
the Trump administration told a judge that
a man seeking release from custody had been deported — when in fact he had not.
Because of the administration’s representation, U.S. District Judge Kyle Dudek,
a Florida-based Trump appointee, tossed his habeas case, saying it was moot.
“There is no live
controversy left to adjudicate, and the Court is powerless to grant relief for
a detention that has already ended,” Dudek wrote.
But on Thursday, Dudek
rescinded his ruling.
“The Court dismissed this
habeas action as moot on the representation that Petitioner was deported. That
fact turned out to be untrue,” he wrote.
Judges increasingly lose patience with ICE
The incessant skirmishing
between the courts and ICE has begun to wear on judges, who have made their
fury known in increasingly pointed rulings and orders. They have, in some
cases, personally rejected dozens of detentions as illegal and taken note as their
colleagues around the country have done so in more than 3,000 cases — compared
to just over 100 cases in which judges have sided with the mass detention
strategy.
U.S. District Judge Jerry
Edwards, Jr., a Biden appointee in Louisiana, said he was “fatigued” by the
deluge. Chen, the New York-based Obama appointee, lamented “the toll
Respondents have exacted on the judiciary by continuing to pursue their new
mandatory detention policy, despite its near-universal rejection.”
But it was U.S. District
Judge Harvey Bartle III, a George H.W. Bush appointee in Pennsylvania,
who wrote most animatedly.
“These petitions are filed
due to the illegal actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” he wrote.
“Despite hundreds of similar rulings in this and other courts resoundingly in
favor of the ICE-detainee petitioners, ICE continues to act contrary to law, to
spend taxpayer money needlessly, and to waste the scarce resources of the
judiciary.”
