Trump Admin Has Been Ruled Against Nearly 17,000 Times in Immigration Cases: Report

AP Photo/John Locher

President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has created an “all-out siege” on the courts that has “stretched the judiciary to the breaking point,” according to an analysis by Politico, but the judges are ruling against the administration in “overwhelming” numbers — nearly 17,000 times so far.

The tactics used during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown (specially the initiative known as “Operation Metro Surge” in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota) have been loudly criticized — even by some Republicans — and sparked nationwide protests, especially after two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis: Renee Good on Jan. 7 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24 by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

The controversy ultimately led to the ouster of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March and Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) taking her place; DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin exited the month prior. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino was defenestrated from his position in January shortly after the shootings of Pretti and Good, reassigned out of Minneapolis, and then his “retirement” was announced.

Polling has shown public opinion souring on the president’s immigration policies — again, even among Republicans.

Multiple court challenges have been filed as well, with the administration losing a slew of motions and cases; many of those judges have been appointed by Republicans or even the president himself.

To be specific, Trump has lost over 16,000 times so far in immigration cases, according to Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney.

The spark for all of this, wrote Cheney, was “a seemingly mundane reinterpretation of a complex immigration law” contained within a two-page memo issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on July 8, 2025 that changed the governments “detention tactics” in an “unprecedented” way.

Politico has reviewed “reviewed thousands of ICE detention cases and spoken with more than a dozen detainees, lawyers and judges at the heart of this historic controversy,” wrote Cheney, and they shared a general consensus that the updated ICE policy had put an “extraordinary strain” on the court system by launching “tens of thousands of emergency lawsuits.”

That July 8, 2025 ICE memo “was an illegal distortion of long-settled detention policy,” according to 469 judges and counting so far, wrote Cheney, rejecting this “novel legal theory” that Trump’s first administration had “declined to adopt.”

The seismic change was a vastly broader imposition of mandatory detention without bond. Before Trump’s second term, this would be applied “only to people apprehended soon after crossing the border or who were deemed to be dangerous, not for those who had built law-abiding lives — married U.S. citizens, had children, held jobs, paid taxes — since they arrived,” Cheney explained. “ICE’s new memo erased that distinction. Now, even people who had lived in the U.S. for years were treated as though they had just crossed the border and were ‘seeking’ to enter the U.S., no matter where they were apprehended or how many years ago they arrived.”

The memo, Cheney continued, “was the beginning of an all-out siege on the American justice system — one that would upend tens of thousands of lives, fracture decades of trust between the courts and the Justice Department, overwhelm court dockets in every corner of the country and provoke a lopsided rebuke from judges of every ideological stripe,” viewing it as “an effort to erase the due process rights of millions of immigrants who have resided in the U.S. for years, even those without criminal records and people who have attended all of their ICE check-ins or immigration court proceedings.”

“The flood of cases has stretched the judiciary to a breaking point across the country,” Cheney wrote. “Thousands of rulings, from hundreds of judges rushing to respond to the individual cases in front of them, have added up to an overwhelming rebuke of Trump’s unprecedented policy.”

Judge Fred Biery of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, a Clinton appointee, told Politico his courthouse in San Antonio normally sees 1,500 civil cases per year, but this year they had tallied 4,000 just by May.

“We’ve never seen anything like this in my career,” said Biery.

The “mountains of lawsuits” have spiked in multiple areas of the country, Cheney described in detail, including where ICE had surged enforcement in Los Angeles and Chicago a d cases related to the “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Everglades in Florida, “[b]ut nowhere was hit harder than Minnesota” in the aftermath of Operation Metro Surge and the shootings of Good and Pretti.

The judges Cheney interviewed spoke frankly about the obstacles unique to these cases, because detainees have to file their habeas corpus petitions in the district court where ICE is holding them, “a particular challenge because of ICE’s penchant for whisking detainees to other states while they seek out lawyers who can locate them and quickly file lawsuits before they’re moved again.”

This has resulted in an enormous toll on judges and court staff, who told Cheney about “mov[ing] at record speed” and staying up until the “wee hours of the morning” to handle cases because of the strictly limited deadlines to hear a habeas case before ICE deported the detainee and it would be “too late.”

That workload stress is compounded by the increasing frequency of the government violating court procedures and even direct orders issued in specific cases. Cheney listed examples of judges having “rebuked” the Trump administration for “violating rules on detaining pregnant or nursing women, drawing up warrants to justify arrests retroactively, subjecting detainees to flawed or unconstitutional bond hearings, and increasingly deporting people in violation of court orders.”

Digging into the specific court rulings, Cheney found “about 54” federal district judges who had ruled in favor of the ICE mandatory detention policy and noted that “about three-quarters” of them are Trump appointees.

In total, Politico’s analysis found rulings in “at least 19,400 detention cases” dating from July 7, 2025 (the day before the ICE memo) until now, with 2,576 rulings in the Trump administration’s favor and 16,860 against.

Beyond the raw numerical data, Cheney highlighted the human toll of these cases — and the administration’s response:

Everyone on the receiving end of ICE’s amped-up detention philosophy — detainees themselves, their lawyers and the judges who hear their cases — described the past year as both logistically and emotionally draining. Every case is existential for the people being detained as well as their families and communities. That makes the work weightier for both attorneys and judges. And there are more cases than attorneys or judges were ever equipped to handle.”

…

Asked whether the administration had any concerns about the impact of its mass detention policy on the families of those held by ICE, particularly U.S. citizen spouses and children, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded simply: “No.”

Read Cheney’s analysis and Politico’s case tracker (including date of ruling, court, judge, which president appointed them, docket number, and status of ruling) here.

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