President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda is getting demolished in courtrooms across America, as federal judges — including many appointed by Trump himself — continue to reject his administration’s sweeping effort to jail immigrants indefinitely without bond or basic due process.
According to a new analysis from Politico, judges have ruled against ICE’s controversial mandatory detention policy more than 10,000 times, compared to only about 1,200 rulings siding with the Trump administration.
The staggering imbalance underscores growing outrage within the federal judiciary over what many judges describe as lawless and unconstitutional conduct by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents carrying out Trump’s mass-deportation campaign.
Judges from coast to coast have blasted ICE for detaining people accused of immigration violations without allowing them a bond hearing or even a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention in court.
Some rulings have been especially scathing.
“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 federal 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.”
The rebukes are not coming from liberal jurists alone. More than 425 federal judges have ruled against the administration’s detention scheme at some point — including a majority of the judges nominated by Trump himself.
In New York, Trump-appointed Judge Gary Brown sharply condemned ICE for repeatedly trying to circumvent court rulings and continue detaining immigrants without bond.
Brown also blasted tactics reportedly used by ICE to frustrate legal challenges, including transferring detainees across state lines to make lawsuits more difficult and releasing people hundreds of miles from home without their belongings after courts ordered their release.
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” Brown wrote in one case involving a man whose legal immigration status was revoked after ICE initiated what the judge called “baseless” deportation proceedings.
“Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
Other judges have resorted to literary and mythological comparisons to express their frustration with the administration’s relentless detention efforts.
One federal judge who ruled against the administration roughly 90 times compared ICE’s legal strategy to the mythical Hydra — the serpent from Greek mythology that grew two new heads every time one was cut off.
Another likened the administration’s repeated attempts to defend the policy to Sisyphus endlessly pushing a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down again.
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III blasted ICE for wasting taxpayer money and judicial resources by continuing to pursue policies courts after court has already ruled against them repeatedly.
“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.
The Trump administration, however, appears unfazed by the avalanche of courtroom defeats.
Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassare dismissed the more than 10,000 adverse rulings as “great,” claiming they expose judges supposedly placing “personal policy preferences ahead of proper interpretations of the law.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson similarly insisted the administration believes the courts will ultimatelyimately side with Trump.
“The law clearly requires detention of aliens pending their removal from the United States,” Jackson said. “We are confident the Trump administration’s view of the law will be vindicated on appeal in the Supreme Court.”
