Immigration Detention Cases Decline Amid Trump Admin Pullback From Hardline Tactics

As the Trump administration has scaled back its most aggressive immigration enforcement efforts, the torrent of emergency lawsuits mounted by ICE detainees has also begun to slow.

Courts have been flooded for months with petitions for habeas corpus — requests by ICE detainees to be released from custody or at least to have a chance to plead their cases. Habeas petitions are still arriving at astonishing levels, but have noticeably declined since the administration pulled back from its mega-enforcement operation in Minnesota.

A POLITICO analysis found that immigration habeas petitions peaked at about 300 to 400 per day from Jan. 16 to Feb. 17, at the height of Operation Metro Surge. It was in this timeframe — which includes the Jan. 24 shooting death of demonstrator Alex Pretti — when public opinion began to sour on the Trump administration’s mass deportation tactics.

Habeas petitions peaked at more than 400 on Feb. 6 but have since steadily declined, dipping below 300 per day late last month and approaching 200 per day by early March.

The decline in habeas cases tracks with a similar decline in immigration arrests reported by The New York Times, citing internal DHS data. That drop comes as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem prepares to leave her role after she was pushed aside amid frustration by the president. Trump aide Stephen Miller once suggested that the administration was hopeful to net 3,000 immigration arrests per day, a comment that drove a wave of lawsuits against Trump administration immigration policies andprompted denials from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The decline in habeas cases also comes as federal appeals courts wrestle with questions about the legality of the administration’s mass detention operation. The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals recently backed the administration’s drive to detain — without an opportunity for bond — thousands of people who have resided in the United States for years, a break from decades of practice by prior administrations. But that ruling, which applies in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, has done little to stem the flood of habeas cases, even in Texas, where judges have largely continued to find the mass detention effort to be a violation of constitutional due process rights.

Cases are also becoming more concentrated in key regions, including southern and western Texas and eastern California. More recently, South Florida, home of Alligator Alcatraz, has seen a sharp rise in habeas petitions. Courts in West Virginia, where a major immigration enforcement operation netted about 600 arrests in January, have continued to grapple with the fallout.

Meanwhile, habeas cases in Minnesota have dropped sharply since the administration last month announced a drawdown of federal agents. Crackdowns in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland led to similar surges in habeas cases late last year and into 2026, but they have also abated.

The drop in emergency litigation is sure to be welcome news to federal judges, whose dockets have been swamped by habeas cases and who have reached a boiling point with the Trump administration over routine violations of their orders. Judges have overwhelmingly ruledthat the administration’s actions are illegal.

It could also provide a breather for federal prosecutors who have seen other work crowded out as they scramble to manage detention cases. The workload led to a memorable February confrontation in a Minnesota courtroom, where a Justice Department attorney lamented the repeated violations of court orders and memorably told a judge “this job sucks.”

Justice Department attorneys in Minnesota, where a raft of veteran lawyers resigned and were fired amid resistance to the handling of the surge, have described sidelining critical investigative work and adopting a defensive posture to handle the deluge of immigration cases. DOJ lawyers in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi have raised similar concerns.

On Tuesday, a top attorney in the Justice Department’s Sacramento-based Eastern District of California office told a federal appeals court that his office has been tasked with handling1,400 habeas cases so far this year. It’s one of several factors he said led him to seek a delay in an appeal related to a Jan. 6 defendant who claims President Donald Trump’s Day One pardon covers an unrelated firearms crime.

“The pace of filings accelerated in 2026, reaching approximately 100 to 200 new cases filed each week,” the attorney, appellate chief Nirav Desai, said in a declaration to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.