ICE’s mass detention

1 year in, ICE’s mass detention policy is on the ropes

ICE's mass detention policy has been in place — and under fire in the courts — for a year.

By Kyle Cheney

Federal judges have spent a full year overwhelmingly rejecting ICE’s effort to lock up people the Trump administration is seeking to deport — finding a combination of illegality, unconstitutionality, incompetence and cruelty at a shocking scale.

More than 15,000 times.

That staggering statistic has been fueled by ICE’s adoption of an unprecedented mass detention policy a year ago. In a July 8, 2025 memo, the agency said agents would detain, without bond, tens of thousands of people with deep roots in the U.S. and overwhelmingly without criminal records. It’s a group that, until last year, would have at least been afforded bond hearings before facing indefinite detention.

POLITICO has tracked and analyzed the flood of litigation ICE detentions produced over the past year. The Trump administration has now been shot down by at least 464 federal judges, with just 54 — overwhelmingly appointed by Trump — ruling in the administration’s favor.

However, even a majority of Trump-appointed judges who have considered the policy ultimately rejected it. In recent weeks, the legal rout has extended to the appeals courts, typically a haven of support for Trump’s policies. The Trump administration is now putting its final hopes in the Supreme Court.

At the heart is ICE’s novel reading of 30-year-old immigration laws that every prior administration understood to apply only to people who had recently crossed the border illegally. That 1996 law required ICE to detain those border-crossers for the duration of their typically expedited deportation proceedings.

But since that July 8, 2025 ICE memo, the administration has argued that this “mandatory detention” applies to virtually anyone who entered the country without permission, no matter how long they’ve resided in the U.S., whether they’ve established roots in their communities, have spouses or children who are U.S. citizens, or have flawless attendance records at ICE check-ins or immigration court proceedings.

What has unfolded since has been one of the most extraordinary legal rebukes in modern history.

For a year, those detained under the new policy have flooded federal courts in every corner of the country with tens of thousands of emergency petitions seeking release or bond hearings. And judges have responded by ordering their release or, at minimum, a bond hearing aimed at forcing the government to justify their continued detention.

And judges have started to scrutinize those bond hearings — led by Trump administration immigration judges — for constitutional defects as well, concluding with increasing frequency that they were not fair or neutral.

Here’s a look at the results, one year in.

The bottom line

POLITICO has tracked and analyzed the surge of emergency lawsuits filed by ICE detainees — known as “petitions for writs of habeas corpus” — over the past year.

The 15,000 rulings against the administration compare to about 2,200 instances in which judges upheld ICE detentions. Those 2,200 rulings have been concentrated in a handful of courts and driven by a small subset of judges.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said the administration remains confident in its legal position on mandatory detention, citing its two appellate court victories and petition to the Supreme Court.

“The law is on our side,” the department said in a statement. Trump administration officials have called the mandatory detention push an antidote to years of “catch-and-release” policies at the border by the Biden administration, attributing its legal defeats to “the left and their activist proxies on the judiciary.”

Advocates for immigrants say the administration’s record in court obscures the reality that many detainees simply give up and accept deportation rather than fight a potentially protracted legal battle — if they are lucky enough to find a lawyer to advocate for them in the first place.

But the rejections have come from a broad swath of courts and judges appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan. And the legal precedents they have set have put a crimp in ICE’s mass detention plans that could reverberate for future administrations.

The state of the law

A year in, appeals courts have now started ruling on ICE’s mandatory detention policy. And while the first two to decide — the Louisiana-based 5th Circuit and the Missouri-based 8th Circuit — sided with the administration, the story since then has been a continuation of the rout against ICE.

Appeals courts based in New York, Georgia, Ohio and Colorado have since rejected ICE’s mandatory detention policy as a misreading of the law. Those rulings require district courts in enormous parts of the country — including Florida, where a disproportionate share of ICE detainees are located — to reject the administration’s approach.

Rulings in the remaining five federal appeals courts are imminent.

Perhaps most significantly, a panel of judges in the 5th Circuit — which covers Texas, the busiest state for ICE detention cases — issued a ruling last week that dramatically undercut ICE’s year-old mandatory detention policy. The 2-1 decision concluded that ICE detainees held under the policy must be afforded a bond hearing within 90 days or immediately released. In the days since, district court judges who had previously been denying release or waiting for clarity began churning out decisions requiring immediate bond hearings or release.

That ruling echoes the Ohio-based 6th Circuit’s decision, which also found ICE detainees retain due process rights while their deportation proceedings play out, particularly if they had previously been permitted by immigration authorities to remain free. It was this decision that the Justice Department chose to appeal to the Supreme Court last month, encouraging the justices to resolve the issue for good. Meanwhile, the ACLU has petitioned the high court to overturn the 5th Circuit’s February ruling that upheld ICE’s mass detention policy.

White flags on the rise

POLITICO previously documented an emerging phenomenon: In dozens of cases, the Justice Department declined to defend ICE detentions, instead simply conceding that detainees were owed bond hearings or even outright release.

That pattern has now played out at least 200 times. In those cases, the Justice Department typically agrees that it will not contest a detainee’s request for a bond hearing or release. In others, DOJ says it was “unable to ascertain sufficient facts” to justify continued detention.

The other detention cases

ICE’s detention of pregnant or nursing mothers — in apparent contravention of a policy that sharply limits the practice and sets strict limits — has continued to roil courts.

The administration has also faced more than 700 rejections from judges for its detention of people who have been ordered deported — and sometimes have lengthy criminal records — but whose home countries refuse to take them back, or who have other obstacles to their deportation.

A 2001 Supreme Court precedent says ICE’s detention of people in this category is “presumptively constitutional” for up to six months. But after that, the government must justify continued detention by showing progress toward deportation.