The number of migrants who claim ICE is detaining them unlawfully has increased nearly 10,000 percent in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term in what critics say is a damning rebuke to MAGA’s claims of going after the “worst of the worst.”
In January 2025, the monthly rate of “habeas corpus” applications for release from unjust or unexplained detention in immigration cases stood at 66. As of January 2026, that number had increased 9,932 percent to 6,621, according to an analysis of federal court data conducted by the Daily Beast. It shows petitions steadily increased throughout last summer before skyrocketing from September onward.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, along with other top Trump administration officials, has repeatedly cited an official policy of targeting violent criminals among the nation’s estimated 54 million migrants as justification for mandatory detentions without the possibility of appeal for release on bond.
Studies and reports have shown that about 75 percent of people arrested by ICE have no criminal background at all, which experts say has in turn fueled the astronomical rise in applications from migrants who say they’ve been detained, often for months on end, without any real cause.
Numbers for the Beast’s analysis were provided by the monitoring group Habeas Dockets, which compiled the data by searching federal court systems, and confirmed by Fatma Marouf, a professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, as a “reliable” indicator of the phenomenon.
The Beast spoke with five lawyers who have pursued hundreds of habeas corpus petitions over the past 12 months, many on behalf of clients whose arrest and detention by ICE represented their first encounter with law enforcement.
Those attorneys shared similar stories. They spoke of psychological breakdown among migrants who spent months in homeland security facilities, underage U.S. citizens separated from their parents, and families driven into poverty by the sheer burden of legal costs in fighting for release.
“I have a client who’s an Iranian refugee… in custody for 180 days,” said Missouri-based immigration lawyer Rekha Sharma-Crawford. “He suffered terrible physical and sexual abuse as a child. When you have someone like that, and you jail them under horrific conditions, and for no reason, it just rips back any layers of healing that might have occurred.”
MAGA’s deportation drive has been largely facilitated by two separate rulings in individual cases, issued in May and September 2025, which effectively barred immigration judges from conducting bond hearings for anyone who entered the U.S. without lawful admission, even if they have lived in the country for decades.
An internal Department of Homeland Security memo reinforced these changes in July, directing ICE agents to treat anyone who entered the country without permission as eligible for mandatory detention, and to deny bond hearings unless DHS chooses to grant parole.
Attorneys argue that this policy violates migrants’ Fifth Amendment rights, which state that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
“That line-graph of habeas applications is a timeline of attacks on the constitutional rights of non-citizens,” said Karen Weinstock, an immigration attorney who practices in Atlanta, Georgia. “If the government does not care to protect the law and constitutional rights, then we’ve simply become a banana republic.”
“The percentage spike is impressive, but the most meaningful metric is the win-loss record,” retired Colorado immigration attorney Dan Kowalski told the Beast. “So far, I think we are winning 95 percent of all cases, and judges are getting p–sed at the Justice Department for their bulls–t resistance.”
Still, many warn that habeas petitions likely represent only a temporary lifeline that may snap under further pressure from the Trump administration.
California-based immigration lawyer Sabrina Damast said that while immigration habeas cases have, for now, remained at the federal level, the Justice Department has “aggressively” appealed rulings, aiming to get the issue before the Supreme Court.
If the conservative majority in the nation’s top court ultimately rules that a blanket denial of bond hearings is permitted under law, Damast explained, habeas petitions in immigration cases would fail from that point on because “once detention is declared lawful, there’s nothing left to challenge.”
“Right now, our philosophy is to enjoy this while we’re able to,” she said. “It will not last, and in the meantime, we free as many people as we can.”
The Daily Beast contacted the White House, the Justice Department, and DHS for comment.
“The entire Trump Administration is working to lawfully deliver on President Trump’s mandate to enforce federal immigration law and carry out the largest mass deportation campaign of criminal illegal aliens in history,” White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson said.
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