10,000 rulings: The courts’ overwhelming rebuke of Trump’s ICE policies
A POLITICO analysis reveals judges have ruled against ICE detention practices in roughly 90 percent of cases since the agency mandated that millions of immigrants must be locked up while they face deportation proceedings.
By Kyle Cheney
Ten thousand losses.
That’s the Trump administration’s track record in court as federal judges grapple with the way ICE agents have swept through major U.S. cities and detained thousands of people in support of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.
Trump’s unprecedented detention policy, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, infuriated lower courts in ways no other modern issue has. It ruptured the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary; pitted the administration against itself; and upended innumerable lives — not just of the people swept up by immigration agents, but of their spouses and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.
POLITICO is tracking the tens of thousands of detention cases that have flooded the system since ICE adopted its detention policy last July. Today we are releasing a full database of those rulings, giving the public an opportunity to see under the hood of our reporting — which has documented the courts’ lopsided results, ICE’s tactics for defying judges’ orders and the rising tensions between the judiciary and the Trump administration.
The trend is clear from every angle. The administration has lost nearly 10,400 of the cases that have been decided, and prevailed in about 1,200. While some judges have heard more cases than others, the overwhelming majority of judges — more than 425 — have reached the same conclusion. Even a majority of Trump-appointed judges have sided against the administration.
Trump administration officials shrug off the one-sided rebuke from the courts, attributing their losses to “the left and their activist proxies on the judiciary” and predicting that they will prevail at the Supreme Court.
“The law is not a popularity contest among judges,” a Justice Department spokesperson said.
As ICE’s detention spree continued to ratchet up over the past 10 months, even the Trump-led Justice Department — tasked with defending the federal government in court — has at times told judges it cannot defend some of ICE’s actions. Many judges hearing these cases have run out of words to express their frustration with what they see as a wreckage of lives and of laws.
“Beyond the reach of ordinary legal description,” one judge wrote. “It is an assault on the constitutional order.”
‘This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America’
These more than 10,000 cases include a nursing mother who was detained despite active refugee status and another mother separated from her one-year-old child and released from custody only when her son landed in the hospital. They include parents of U.S. military servicemembers, trafficking victims or witnesses, a 5-year-old boy detained by ICE on his way home from school.
Judges who have handled dozens of detention cases have described deepening frustration with ICE’s relentless detention drive and its defiance of court orders.
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee based in New York, in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE arrested him. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
One judge reached back to Greek myth after ruling against the administration 90 times, invoking Heracles’ effort to slay “a serpent whose heads regenerated twofold for each head that was lopped off.” Another, also borrowing from antiquity, compared it to Sisyphus’ endless march to push a boulder uphill.
Others have been alarmed by the tactics ICE has used to effectuate its mass detention mandate: arresting parents dropping off school kids, positioning agents in courthouses to make arrests after immigration hearings, detaining people at ICE offices after routine check-ins, grabbing people once promised protection from enforcement through programs like DACA, and executing after-the-fact warrants that judges say have been used to paper over unjustified arrests. In rare but extreme cases, the Trump administration has acknowledged deporting people in violation of court orders.
The flood of cases has overwhelmed both courts and the Justice Department, which had to call up inexperienced attorneys from other parts of the federal government to stand in for under-staffed U.S. attorney’s offices. And they have sometimes found themselves in an impossible position when ICE refuses to comply with judges’ orders, even ghosting its own lawyers in the process.
“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,” said U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III, a George H.W. Bush appointee from Pennsylvania.
An unprecedented policy
Presidents’ signature initiatives often end up in court. But this flood of adverse rulings is unique — a never-before-seen reaction to a never-before-seen policy.
Federal law requires the detention of “applicants for admission” to the U.S. who are “seeking admission” to the country. Every previous administration has interpreted the provision to apply primarily to people who were apprehended at the border — until last year. In a July 8, 2025 memo, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons said that millions of immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for years would now be treated as “seeking admission” to the country, subjecting them to mandatory detention without the opportunity for bond.
Until Lyons’ memo, millions fewer people were treated as eligible for detention, and people who were detained could still be released on bond, at the discretion of immigration judges who work for the executive branch. But the administration’s policy shift pushed millions of people into a framework that denies bond hearings from the outset.
Courts were then flooded with lawsuits from individual detainees, seeking bond hearings or release based on their individual circumstances — and that’s why this policy has produced such an enormous volume of court cases. ICE has also either defied or tried to circumvent many of those rulings — for example, moving detainees to a new state, where they’ll need to bring a new case with a new lawyer; or providing hearings that judges found to be insufficient. That gamesmanship creates even more litigation, and has been a major driver of courts’ mounting frustration with the administration.
Though the policy shift on mandatory detentions has driven the nationwide surge in emergency lawsuits, it’s not the only category of cases that has led to judicial pushback. POLITICO’s database also includes thousands of cases in which judges concluded that ICE had violated its own rules, deprived people of due process or held people for unconstitutionally lengthy periods without a realistic prospect of actually deporting them.
Trump administration officials have said the novel ICE detention policy is an antidote to years of what they’ve called “catch-and-release” border policies by the Biden administration — and that it’s working. ICE often points to the number of voluntary departures from the country, and the steep drop in border crossings, as a sign of the success of its deportation agenda.
The White House, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security declined to answer specific questions for this story. They leveled sweeping criticism at the judges who have ruled against them — DHS called them “judicial activists” — and predicted they would ultimately win at the Supreme Court.
Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassare, asked about the more than 10,000 rulings against the administration, replied: “That’s great, now the American people can see how judges are putting personal policy preferences ahead of proper interpretations of the law.”
The Department of Homeland Security attributed the spike in lawsuits filed by ICE detainees to the rulings themselves, saying the judges’ decisions incentivized others to rush to court to seek release.
“The law clearly requires detention of aliens pending their removal from the United States,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “We are confident the Trump Administration’s view of the law will be vindicated on appeal in the Supreme Court.”
Heading toward SCOTUS
The administration’s predictions that ICE’s detention policy would be vindicated on appeal has met mixed results. Two federal appeals courts — the 5th Circuit and 8th Circuit — have ruled in favor of the administration’s position. Those courts cover parts of the country, including Texas and Minnesota, where enforcement efforts have been particularly aggressive.
Three others — the New York-based 2nd Circuit, Atlanta-based 11th Circuit and Cincinnati-based 6th-Circuit — have ruled against the administration. Another panel in the 7th Circuit deadlocked. More appellate rulings are imminent.
The division among appeals courts points toward an ultimate resolution by the Supreme Court.
District court judges are obligated to follow the rulings of their respective circuit courts, so some judges, particularly in Texas and Minnesota, who had been ordering bond hearings or outright release of ICE detainees have now had their hands tied. Other judges in those states have found workarounds to continue rejecting mandatory detention on other constitutional due process grounds. The 6th Circuit endorsed that approach in a ruling this week.
As the issue works its way up the ladder of the judicial system, lower-court judges will have less and less power over the outcome, and the proceedings will become more focused on legal arguments than individual circumstances. But the human experiences that make up these more than 10,000 cases have clearly affected any number of judges.
“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency,” U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, a Clinton appointee based in Texas, wrote in a three-page ruling ordering the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos. “And the rule of law be damned.”
