“ President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing the law and arresting illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country, and reversed Biden’ s catch and release policy. We are applying the law as written,” wrote Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson.
The caseload has overwhelmed legal advocates and government attorneys.
In court filings, U. S. attorneys are telling judges the sheer volume of petitions is burdening their offices, pushing them to shift resources away from other priorities. In a case originating from Minnesota, where the administration has been waging a monthslong immigration crackdown, U. S. Attorney Daniel Rosen wrote in a declaration that his attorneys and paralegals were“ continuously working over time” while the office’ s civil division was at 50 % capacity.
The number of habeas filings in that state jumped from a dozen in 2024 to over 700 in the past two months alone, placing Minnesota third behind Texas and California, ProPublica found. The load has been such that, in a rare moment of candor, a government attorney detailed to the office complained to a federal judge that“ the system sucks, this job sucks.” The lawyer, Julie Le, reportedly was let go from the U. S. attorney’ s office after the public rant.( ProPublica was not able to reach Le for comment. The Department of Justice confirmed her detail with the office was over.)
“ If rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating cases and respected the Government’ s obligation to properly prepare cases, there wouldn’ t be an‘ overwhelming’ habeas caseload or concern over DHS following orders,” a DOJ spokesperson wrote in response to questions from ProPublica.
“ Then there are a lot of rogue judges,” said David Briones, a senior judge in the Western District of Texas, in response to the Justice Department’ s statement.“ Obviously we feel that we’ re correct, that’ s all I can say.” The Western District of Texas leads the country in habeas cases, with over 1,300 filed in the last three months, and Briones has generally ruled against the government in these cases, according to El Paso Matters. The Texas Tribune has also reported on the rise of habeas cases in Texas.
Judges are growing increasingly frustrated, publicly rebuking the administration for missing deadlines and failing to comply with court orders.
Recently, a Texas federal judge ordered the release of the 5-year-old Minnesota boy who made headlines after he was pictured wearing a blue bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack as immigration agents escorted him and his father to their vehicle. In a fiery ruling, judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas chastised the administration for Liam Conejo Ramos’ detention.“ The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetentlyimplemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” he wrote.
The number of immigrants held in detention has increased from around 40,000 when Trump took office to more than 70,000 this year. While the number of recent border crossers in detention has fallen, the number of detained immigrants arrested by federal immigration agents elsewhere in the country tripled during the first nine months of the Trump administration, a recent analysis by the Deportation Data Project found.
“ It’ s just been a very, very chaotic landscape,” said Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project, a national advocacy organization that, among other things, represents detained immigrants and provides assistance to attorneys and community-based groups.
“ And I think that chaos is bleeding into communities everywhere, both because of the extremely traumatizing ways that people are being arrested and detained,” she said, and because of the amount of money and resources being spent on detaining people who in the past would have gotten out on bond or not been detained in the first place as their cases made their way through the process.
Denise Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, who has argued habeas cases on behalf of immigrants over the years, sees a positive side to the sudden rise in cases, she told ProPublica.“ People are starting to pay attention to how massive and arbitrary and illogical the immigration detention system is.”
For this story, ProPublica analyzed federal habeas petitions filed by immigrant detainees in district courts across the country using records from Public Access to Court Electronic Records and the Free Law Project. The data includes some cases that were refiled for a variety of reasons, such as filing errors or deficiencies. ProPublica originally published this story on February 10, 2026.
94 The Trial Lawyer