Judges across the country are overwhelmingly rejecting President Donald Trump’s hopes to indefinitely detain immigrants as part of his mass deportation plans.
Analysis from Politico found that there have been more than 10,000 examples of federal judges ruling against ICE’s controversial mandatory detention policy, compared with just 1,200 cases in which they sided with the Trump administration.
Judges are also routinely voicing their frustrations with the Trump administration for continuing to detain people suspected of living in the country illegally without the possibility of release on bond or an opportunity to plead their case, even after being repeatedly rebuffed in court.
The aggressive tactics of ICE agents during immigration raids have also come under strong condemnation from judges ruling against the mass-detention policy.
“Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process,” West Virginia Judge Joseph Goodwin wrote in a February ruling.
“It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.”
In total, more than 425 federal judges across the country have at one stage ruled against the administration’s detention plans, including a majority of those nominated to the bench by Trump.
One such Trump appointee, New York-based Judge Gary Brown, blasted ICE’s repeated attempts to detain immigrants without bond, as well as its efforts to find new ways to defy court orders.
These tactics include moving detainees from state to state to prevent them from filing lawsuits seeking release, or dumping them hundreds of miles from home without their possessions after courts ordered their release.
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” Brown wrote in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE attempted “baseless” removal proceedings against him.
“Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
One judge who ruled against the administration 90 times cited Greek mythology and likened the administration’s attempts to continue detaining migrants without just cause to Hercules’ effort to slay “a serpent whose heads regenerated twofold for each head that was lopped off.”
Another judge compared the Trump administration to Sisyphus endlessly rolling a boulder uphill in a December ruling.
Elsewhere, U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III condemned ICE for the time and effort it is wasting while continuing to carry out its mass-detention mandate.
“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,” Bartle wrote in February.
“While some judicial activists seek to thwart much-needed changes like this, DHS has been vindicated by the Supreme Court again and again,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Daily Beast.
“DHS has the law and the facts on its side and will be vindicated on this issue too. Despite a historic number of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly and overtime to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final destination—home.”
In a statement, Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassare suggested judges ruling against the administration more than 10,000 times was “great.”
“Now the American people can see how judges are putting personal policy preferences ahead of proper interpretations of the law,” Baldassare told Politico.
“The law clearly requires detention of aliens pending their removal from the United States,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson added. “We are confident the Trump administration’s view of the law will be vindicated on appeal in the Supreme Court.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Justice Department for further comment.
