Emergency lawsuits from immigrants seeking release from detention have declined in recent weeks, as the Trump administration has, at least for the moment, pulled back slightly from the aggressive, military-style immigration enforcement it has carried out in Minneapolis and cities across the country.
The administration announced in February it was drawing down its Minnesota operation, and the White House moved this month to oust Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversaw the surge there, which resulted in agents fatally shooting two U.S. citizens and prompted widespread protests. No cities have been hit with a new major crackdown since.
Nationwide, there were about 11 percent fewer immigration arrests in February, according to a New York Times analysis, though arrest levels were still nearly four times higher than those under the Biden administration.
For the moment, reports have tapered off of agents storming Home Depot parking lots, arresting immigrant day laborers or conducting raids on apartment buildings.
Still, critics warn the administration has shown no deeper signs of backing away from immigration policies they allege lead to racial profiling and mass, illegal arrests.
Last year, the Trump administration reinterpreted longstanding precedent and claimed that arrested immigrants, even those who have been in the U.S. for years and lack criminal records, were not eligible to seek bond as their immigration cases moved through the system, a process that can take months or years.
“The objective is 100 percent for individuals to give up,” Rekha Sharma-Crawford, a Missouri-based attorney and second vice president at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told The Independent. “It is designed to short-circuit any due process that they may be entitled to.”
These changes paired with intense political pressure on immigration agencies from the White House, where Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller reportedly berated agents to conduct 3,000 arrests per day to meet the president’s goals.
That helped lead to a spike in immigrants behind bars, as well as scores of emergency habeas corpus challenges, where federal officials must justify before a judge why they are still holding someone in detention.
Between January and mid-February of this year, there were between 300 and 400 such petitions every day, a Politico analysis found, overwhelming federal courts and Justice Department officials alike, one of whom memorably complained, in a courtroom, “This job sucks.”
Since peaking on February 6, the number of habeas challenges has declined reaching roughly 300 per day in late February and approaching 200 per day in early March, the analysis found.
“Nobody is changing the Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities.”
“Thanks to President Trump’s strong immigration enforcement policies, approximately 3 million illegals have left the United States, either through forced deportation or self-deportation, with zero illegals coming through the most secure border in U.S. History for nine straight months,” she added.
The Independent has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Still, immigration experts warn that the crisis is far from over.
Since January of last year, immigrants have filed more than 26,000 habeas cases — more than the number filed in the last three administrations combined, according to a ProPublica database.
Immigrants have resorted to using this legal tool because the Trump administration has shut off most other avenues people can use to challenge their detention in the prison-like centers, which have been accused of poor health conditions, legal access violations, and widespread mistreatment of detainees.
“We’re suing the federal government weekly,” immigration lawyer Jeremy McKinney, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Mother Jones earlier this month. “We have to kick the door down.”
The arrests at issue have largely been found to be unlawful, according to federal judges.
Since Trump took office, hundreds of judges around the country ruled more than 4,400 times that immigrants were being illegally detained, a Reuters review found. Despite being appointed by different presidential administrations, judges have been nearly unanimous against the Trump administration’s new detention policies.
“There is a reason why hundreds of case across the country, in federal courts across the country, have found the new interpretation of the law by the administration, that offsets decades of precedent, to be unlawful,” Sharma-Crawford, the immigration attorney, said. “When you get back and you look at history and all of the cases on detention, whether criminal or civil for that matter, liberty is not supposed to be the exception, and yet this administration has made it the exception.”
However, even lawsuits can only do so much against the administration, which judges and immigrants alike have accused of systematically ignoring court orders.
Judges in hotspots like Minnesota have threatened government attorneys with being held in contempt — or even given prison time — over what they say is a pattern of the administration ignoring court orders or being slow to enact them.
Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, whose office has been hamstrung with resignations and controversy as part of the immigration surge, argues that any issues have not been a result of malice.
“Nobody has been willfully disobedient,” he said in court earlier this month. “There have been mistakes that have been made but that’s a far cry from contempt of court.”
Rosen partially blamed the Trump administration’s fast-moving approach to immigration — where tactics and objectives change quickly and migrants are often swiftly moved out of state to detention centers — for issues complying with court directives.
“As the surge was ongoing, ICE was constantly instituting new procedures to try to keep up with these issues,” Rosen reportedly told a judge. “Perfection was never achieved.”
The habeas complaints may have dipped slightly, but the underlying attempt from the Trump administration to detain tens of thousands of immigrants at a time hasn’t gone anywhere.
In fact, in some jurisdictions, it just got a major boost.
Earlier this month, a federal appeals court covering Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas ruled that the Trump administration can hold immigrants without bond, regardless of how long they have been in the U.S.
“It’s taken the ability to pursue your immigration case and claims without being detained off the table for thousands of people,” Sarah Whittington, advocacy director at the ACLU of Louisiana, told the Louisiana Illuminator after the ruling.
Also in March, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers much of the West Coast, paused a series of orders that created a nationwide class of immigrants who were entitled to bond hearings.
The political calculus around launching another Minneapolis-style operation may be changing — especially as polls show voters do not approve of the president’s immigration policies heading into midterm season — but Sharma-Crawford argued that the administration still clearly has its sights set on mass, long-term detention and sweeping arrests. She said the White House has plenty of tools left to accomplish those goals, even if they get less headlines going forward.
Red states haven’t mounted the same kind of mass deportation protests as cities like Minneapolis or Los Angeles did, and law enforcement cooperation agreements shift some of ICE’s politically toxic “dirty work” onto local police, she said.
“In the deeper, more conservative states, what they’re doing is going in and opening up these massive detention facilities,” she said. “That’s some writing on the wall that says they are only intent on increasing the number of people that they want to detain.”
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