The administration says the sweeping detentions are a key prong of Trump’s deportation strategy.
The Trump administration is systematically locking up immigrants while they contest the government’s attempts to deport them, even if they’ve lived in the United States for decades and have no criminal record.
This indiscriminate mass detention — a dramatic shift in immigration enforcement policy that began on July 8 — has been declared illegal by dozens of federal judges, who have described it as a flagrant perversion of long-standing law, policy, and common sense.
But the administration says its reinterpretation of the law is both legal and a key prong of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation strategy. They say no matter how long someone has resided illegally in the country — “for 25 minutes or 25 years” — the law doesn’t just allow, it requires, their detention while awaiting deportation. And they hope this interpretation encourages many to depart the country voluntarily.
The result has been hundreds of frantic lawsuits by immigrants who have been arrested without warning at work, at routine check-ins with immigration authorities or after immigration court proceedings. Immigration lawyers and advocates contend they’re being sent to overcrowded and unsanitary detention facilities.
This mass detention led to the Baltimore-area arrest of a Mexican man, in the United States for 30 years with no criminal record, who has a son on active duty in the Air Force; the arrest of a Brazilian man residing near Burlington, Massachusetts, who had a 1-week-old baby at the time he was detained; and a Salvadoran woman, residing in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, who arrived in the United States as a minor in 2016 and has two U.S. citizen children, including one who was nursing at the time of her arrest.
Immigrant advocates say the goal is clear: make the process so excruciating that people give up and accept deportation — even if they have meritorious asylum claims or pathways to legal status.
“They’re making a legal argument that judges are consistently rejecting on the substance, but they’re also using the procedure to get what they want,” said Michael Kagan, director of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Immigration Clinic.
Immigrants are increasingly turning to federal district courts — which historically have not handled immigration matters — as a last resort, citing violations of their legal and constitutional rights. Their lawsuits have led to dozens of recent rulings from gobsmacked judges who say the administration has violated the law and due process rights and is threatening to do so for millions more. The pileup of decisions is growing daily.
