- Immigrants have filed over 18,000 habeas corpus petitions in 13 months to challenge mass detention policies.
- Federal judges overwhelmingly rule against the administration, with over 300 decisions ordering releases or bond hearings.
- Filings surged by over 9,900 percent in one year as enforcement and detention efforts accelerated.
(UNITED STATES) — Immigrants facing detention under President Trump’s second-term deportation policies have filed over 18,000 habeas corpus petitions in federal courts in the first 13 months, challenging what lawyers describe as a system of mass detention that increasingly leaves detainees with no other fast way to seek release.
The filings, which average over 200 daily so far in 2026, have poured into federal court dockets in cases that often demand emergency action to stop transfers, secure access to a hearing, or prevent removal while legal claims are reviewed.
California and Texas account for 40% of the petitions, reflecting where immigration enforcement, large detention footprints, and heavy immigration court calendars intersect most intensely.
At the center of many petitions sits a detention approach that mandates custody without bond hearings for most immigrants entering illegally, a policy that has fueled claims of unlawful indefinite detention and due process violations as cases move quickly through the deportation system.
Habeas corpus petitions have long served as a way to ask a federal judge to review the lawfulness of a person’s detention, and the current surge has turned that tool into a routine feature of immigration litigation under the administration’s accelerated enforcement push.
Many filings argue that detention rules and administrative decisions leave people stuck in custody with no realistic pathway to ask an immigration judge for release, pushing them into federal court once other steps are exhausted.
A Bureau of Immigration Appeals (BIA) decision bars immigration judges from bond hearings in certain cases, a change that has widened the role of federal habeas petitions as detainees seek a judge outside the immigration court system to review custody.
Petitioners have also argued that the government misapplies the Immigration and Nationality Act in ways that expand mandatory detention beyond what Congress authorized, including in cases involving long-term U.S. residents.
A Politico analysis described a pattern in which judges found the government misapplies Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) provisions meant for border entrants to long-term U.S. residents, including those present for 20 years.
Federal judges have overwhelmingly sided with petitioners in the detention disputes. Over 300 have ruled against the administration’s detention approach, ordering releases or bond hearings, while only 14 have upheld it.
Those rulings, issued across a wide range of jurisdictions, reflect a growing judicial skepticism of blanket detention interpretations and a willingness in many cases to order rapid custody reviews when petitioners show imminent harm.
In some cases, judges have moved quickly with orders that function like emergency relief, forcing the government to pause a transfer or provide a bond hearing before detention continues.
One such case unfolded in New York in January. U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken issued a January 16, 2026, emergency order barring the transfer of an Ecuadorean man detained at his New York hearing, and U.S. District Judge Andrew Carter followed with a January 30 release order.
The pushback has not produced uniform outcomes, and differing interpretations of INA detention provisions have begun to harden into splits that carry major consequences for who can seek a bond hearing and when.
Judges have been asked to draw lines between people who recently crossed the border and people with deeper ties to the United States, with petitioners arguing that the same mandatory detention logic should not apply across those categories.
The cases also show how procedural barriers and rapid detention decisions can funnel disputes into federal court on an emergency basis, even when the legal questions turn on technical readings of statutes and administrative precedent.
A prominent dispute has involved the question of whether habeas rights can follow detainees even after removal, especially when removals happen quickly and into detention abroad.
Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, who leads the federal district court in Washington, D.C., recently ordered the return of over 100 Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador’s “megaprison” without due process, ruling they retain habeas rights abroad.
That order highlighted a recurring claim in the petitions: that access to a court must remain meaningful even when the government moves detainees across state lines or outside the country before lawyers can file.
The docket also includes cases that span nationalities and personal circumstances, reflecting how the administration’s detention policies reach far beyond a narrow category of recent border crossers.
Petitions have been filed for a five-year-old Ecuadorean boy, Liam Conejo, detained in Minnesota, and for a Ukrainian cable technician with humanitarian status.
Other petitions described a Salvadoran father of a U.S. citizen child, an Eritrean refugee hospital worker, and a Venezuelan father arrested post-school drop-off.
Lawyers have used emergency habeas filings in such cases to try to pause transfers or removals long enough to secure access to a hearing, arguing that the speed of enforcement can deprive detainees of any practical chance to present claims.
The scale of filings has risen sharply over time, with monthly totals tracking what lawyers describe as increased detention throughput as the administration pursued broader detention and accelerated deportation practices.
January filings rose from 66 in January 2025 to 6,621 in January 2026, a 9,932% increase.
That jump, combined with the pace of filings so far in 2026, has made habeas litigation a central battleground over detention policy, rather than a niche remedy reserved for unusual cases.
Disputes over who is being detained have also become a core feature of the litigation, because criminal history claims often shape arguments about flight risk, danger, and whether individual custody reviews are required.
The data point most frequently cited in these fights is that 75% of ICE arrestees lack criminal records, a figure that petitioners and their lawyers argue undermines public assertions that enforcement is aimed at “violent criminals.”
Those assertions matter in court because many petitions seek individualized determinations and argue that categorical detention rules treat people as presumptively dangerous without a hearing.
They also matter politically, since the public rationale for expanded detention often turns on claims about who is being targeted and why.
The administration, through the Justice Department, has defended its detention approach in court and has aggressively appealed adverse rulings, setting up a fast-moving appellate landscape that is already affecting detention outcomes across the country.
A 5th Circuit panel, covering Texas, limited bond hearings to lawful entrants, a ruling advocates deemed “devastating” because of its implications for large numbers of detainees in a state that accounts for a substantial share of filings.
Appeals are pending in nine circuits, a breadth that increases the odds that the U.S. Supreme Court will face growing pressure to impose national uniformity on questions that now generate different answers depending on where someone is detained.
Another flashpoint has involved the administration’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act for some deportations, a move that has intersected with habeas litigation when detainees argue that removals are occurring too quickly for courts to review.
Courts, including Supreme Court rulings, have upheld habeas access even amid fast-moving removals, keeping the door open for detainees to argue that detention and deportation decisions remain subject to judicial review.
That legal backdrop has also revived public discussion of suspension, though the constitutional framework described in the litigation has emphasized that only Congress can act under the Suspension Clause.
The tension between speed and review runs through many of the petitions, especially when detainees are transferred far from lawyers or from the court where a petition was filed, which can reshape venue and jurisdiction questions midstream.
Advocates have responded by filing petitions as quickly as possible, including same-day filings in places like New York aimed at preventing out-of-state transfers that could separate detainees from local counsel and complicate federal court review.
ProPublica has tracked the cases as the new policies upend precedents that once allowed community release for low-risk immigrants, adding real-time visibility to litigation strategies that depend on timing as much as legal argument.
That monitoring has taken on added importance in a system where a removal, a transfer, or a denial of a bond hearing can happen quickly, leaving habeas petitions as a last-ditch mechanism to bring a detainee before a federal judge.
For many petitioners, the practical stakes are immediate: a chance to argue for release, a chance to see a judge, or a chance to stop a transfer long enough to keep a case in a court that can act in time.
