A flood of challenges by immigrants seeking to be freed from detention facilities are delaying civil cases, forcing courts to hire more employees, and prompting some judges to share concerns directly with Chief Justice John Roberts.
The spike in immigration habeas petitions that began last year took federal judges by surprise. While some judges have since made changes to better manage the heavy caseload, courts are still struggling to keep up with the thousands of time-sensitive cases overwhelming crowded dockets, according to interviews with half a dozen federal judges.
“This has imposed on our court a workload that’s unlike anything that I’ve experienced in my 20 years as a judge,” said Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of the US District Court for the District of Minnesota, whose state saw heightened immigration enforcement last year.
The strain prompted one chief judge, Randy Crane of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, to raise the issue with the chief justice, who also presides over the judiciary’s policymaking body.
Crane said that, at a breakfast with Roberts, he and other district judges in border states said their top problem was the “overwhelming number of habeas petitions,” and that they didn’t think the crushing caseloads would end until the Supreme Court weighed in.
“He just sort of smiled,” Crane said of Roberts. “So he’s heard of it.”
Case Surge
The increase in immigration habeas petitions came after the Trump administration began detaining nearly all arrested immigrants without bond hearings under a new legal interpretation.
Some districts, including those with immigration detention facilities, were suddenly receiving as many as hundreds of these cases a month, after handling few in the past. The increase has also strained resources at federal prosecutors’ offices and the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation.
The Sacramento-based US District Court for the Eastern District of California, for example, received one immigration habeas case in all of 2022. Nearly 3,900 immigration habeas petitions were filed there during the first five months of 2026, according to data provided by its chief judge.
The federal court in Minnesota, home of the administration’s Operation Metro Surge, received more than 1,200 immigration habeas cases in the first six months of the year—up from just 12 two years earlier, Schiltz said.
The US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, which houses several detention centers including the Everglades facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” received roughly 2,000 immigration habeas petitions this year, as of May 15. The year prior, the district got just 152 such cases total, according to its chief judge.
Affected courts have trained staff attorneys to focus on these cases, leaned on semi-retired or other courts’ judges, and obtained approval to hire additional employees to focus on immigration, chief judges said.
Still, the caseload crunch has delayed decisions in civil cases while judges prioritize more urgent criminal and detention cases, judges said.
“It affects our ability to give people timely justice,” said Chief Judge Marcia Morales Howard, who sits in Jacksonville, Fla.
She warned that if these habeas cases continue at their current pace, the district’s Fort Myers division—which she said gets as many as dozens of these cases daily—may eventually be unable to handle any civil cases.
Schiltz, who said he’s worked every day since the administration’s enforcement operation began, said civil rights, business, and contracts cases have “suffered the brunt” of the delays.
“We always want to get things done as quickly as we can, but we just don’t have any choice,” Schiltz said. “The caseload is beyond our capacity to quickly resolve it.”
In Texas, Crane said he fields calls from lawyers complaining about judges not moving fast enough on cases. “They’re not being ignored,” he said. “Everybody’s handling these things as best they can, as quickly as they can. There’s just so many, they can’t get to everything immediately.”
The strain is particularly acute for courts that already didn’t have enough judges. Congress passed legislation in 2024 to expand undersized courts but then-President Joe Biden vetoed the measure.
The influx “highlights that we’re simply not equipped to deal with these cases ourselves,” said Chief Judge Troy Nunley of the Sacramento federal court, which would have gotten four judges under the bill.
Corey McCrea, a spokesperson for the courts’ administrative office, said the judiciary’s budget included “significant increases” for staffing, which courts with increased immigration cases may use to hire more staff.
‘Baseball Bat’
Several federal judges said their courts weren’t prepared when the surge started. Judges and their staff scrambled to set up a system to efficiently process these cases and get up to speed on the relevant law.
“It was like getting hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat,” Nunley said.
Howard said some staff attorneys were trained specifically in immigration habeas matters to handle those cases almost exclusively. She said her district was approved to hire three more attorneys to help judges with these cases.
Chief Judge Cynthia Bashant of the San Diego-based US District Court for the Southern District of California said she’s looking to hire two additional law clerks to focus solely on immigration cases.
Nunley’s court was also approved to hire more law clerks, and he and other judges periodically bring food for staff to boost morale amid long hours.
Meanwhile, judges are deciding these cases as the law remains in flux. Federal appeals courts have split over the administration’s authority to detain certain immigrants without bond hearings, teeing the issue up for likely Supreme Court review.
When the case influx began, Bashant recounted that other judges and staff told her they needed help and were “drowning.” Her staff is now “managing a little better,” she said, but there’s still an “ever present concern” looming: that the already-high habeas caseload could grow, beyond the district’s capacity.
If too many people are detained and denied hearings, “Can we handle that? How do we handle that?” she said.