Tracking Trump in Court: The Scope of Executive Power Tested

Federal district courts are broadly rejecting the Trump administration’s new mandatory detention policy for noncitizens awaiting deportation, with a flood of rulings in favor of detainees who say their due process rights are being violated.

For decades, noncitizens arrested in the interior of the country were generally given bond hearings in immigration court, offering them a chance at release that federal immigration law doesn’t provide to those captured at border crossings. The Department of Homeland Security this summer adopted a new reading of the Immigration and Nationality Act that asserted nearly all noncitizens arrested by immigration authorities must be detained while their cases proceed.

Immigration attorneys and advocacy groups responded with a flood of habeas corpus petitions claiming the new policy infringes on the rights of the detainees, some of whom have lived in the country for years. Judge Jeffrey Cummings said his analysis of petitions filed in the Northern District of Illinois show that the new policy has swept up landscapers, taxi drivers, street vendors, and people attending immigration hearings.

Judges across the country have ruled against the Trump administration on the issue, ordering the government to either schedule a prompt bond hearing or release the person who sued. Earlier this month, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York ordered ICE to immediately release a detainee who had been in the country since early 2024 and is seeking asylum.

“Over and over—in hundreds of cases decided by hundreds of judges across the country, including this Court just last week—the administration has been told that what it is doing is unlawful,” Kaplan wrote.

The Justice Department continues to advance the argument, and while losses are mounting in the federal trial courts, the issue of mandatory detention will soon be before federal appeals courts. One regional class action could be heard by the Ninth Circuit as early as March.

Read More on the policy shift here.

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Updates with new story on the Supreme Court's recent grants of emergency relief for the Trump administration.