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.”
