President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention practices are so outside of what the law allows that even judges he appointed are freeing immigrants found to have committed serious crimes, and who sometimes have deportation orders against them, because they weren’t detained lawfully.
This is on top of the much more public, and outrage-inspiring, cases in which the Trump administration is targeting U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, immigrants who otherwise were following the law, and even military veterans.
According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, “hundreds of immigrants targeted amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation drive with murky histories — and sometimes sordid criminal records … nevertheless have been found by federal courts to be illegally detained.”
Among this group, he wrote, includes “A Cambodian national convicted of aggravated robbery in 1993. A stateless Palestinian man who pleaded guilty to driving under the influence and drug crimes in 2018. A Ukrainian man who fled the war with Russia in 2022 only to lose lawful status last year when he accidentally drove his UberEats delivery across the Mexican border. A Cuban man convicted of child abuse in 2020.”
In some cases, wrote Cheney, the immigrants are stateless, from countries like the Soviet Union that no longer exist, or have been found by another court to have credible fear of persecution if returned to their native country. In others, they were held for a longer period of time than the law allows before deportation, sometimes much longer.
“U.S. District Judge John Hinderaker, a Trump appointee in Arizona, ordered the release of a Cameroonian woman who was ordered deported but protected from being sent to her home country over concerns about torture,” noted the report. “U.S. District Judge Dominic Lanza, another Arizona-based Trump appointee, recently ordered the release of a Honduran woman, convicted of sex crimes in 2006 and incarcerated until 2022, who received similar protections from torture in her home country.”
“These people have served their criminal sentences but were released — sometimes years, and even decades ago — after ICE was unable to deport them,” wrote Cheney in a follow-up post to X. “The Trump administation has been re-detaining them and claiming to have restarted or reinvigorated deportation efforts, but courts have routinely found this to be predicated on ‘hope’ rather than concrete progress.”
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