A lawsuit filed on Thursday takes aim at sky-high civil penalties imposed on undocumented migrants, an increasingly common tool the Trump administration has embraced to compel people to leave the United States.
According to the lawsuit, the government has sent migrants tens of thousands of notices informing them that they have been assessed a $1,000 daily fine for being illegally present in the country. In some cases, the suit argues, the fines have been assessed retroactively, stretching back five years and totaling about $1.8 million. The suit argues that the Trump administration has illegally seized on a narrow provision of immigration law that has never been widely used, driving many people seeking lawful status into “ruinous debt.”
Devised as a class action, the lawsuit was brought on behalf of two women who were assessed the fees in spite of what they argued were efforts to comply with the law and chart a path to stay in the United States legally. It asks a federal judge in Massachusetts to issue a ruling covering all of the at least 21,500 people who, as of August, have received similar penalties.
Lawyers said the fines had been issued indiscriminately, based on a checklist from a government form established in 1957 that often overlooks actions people have taken to comply with immigration officials. Legislation adopted in 1996 allowed the government to impose a fine of nearly $1,000 per day against those who “willfully” failed or refused to depart, but those penalties have not been employed in the past, except briefly during President Trump’s first term.
The law also places a statute of limitations for assessing the penalties at five years. The Trump administration has reasoned it can therefore fine anyone who has been in the country longer than that time five years’ worth of daily penalties.
By the end of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had only 26 active civil penalties cases, according to public records. The lawsuit notes that after Mr. Trump left office, the Biden administration quickly rescinded immigration agencies’ authorization to issue penalties and canceled outstanding fines.
In its aggressive push to maximize immigration authorities and significantly ramp up deportations, the Trump administration has begun issuing fines again, totaling several billion dollars since his second term began. The Trump administration has also tried to incentivize migrants to “self-deport” with offers of free flights and $1,000 stipends.
“Lots of people who are getting these fines are doing everything by the books,” said Charles Moore, a senior attorney at Public Justice, which brought the suit. “They might be checking in with I.C.E., they’re trying to navigate an immigration system that is incredibly complex, and a lot of them are applying for relief that would allow them to achieve lawful status.”
“Nevertheless, they’re being targeted for these civil penalties in a way that completely disregards the law,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. When announcing the policy in June, Tricia McLaughlin, a homeland security spokeswoman, said: “the law doesn’t enforce itself; there must be consequences for breaking it.”
Mr. Moore said that the threat of the fines alone had the potential to sow dread in many households, but that the Trump administration had also taken steps to collect on them. In announcing the policy in May, the White House indicated that immigration officials were exploring methods to garnish wages and seize assets of those who could not pay, potentially capturing their income for years.
In an interview with The New York Times, one of the plaintiffs, who is identified as Nancy M. in court filings, said she received a notice that she was being fined $1.8 million shortly after the Trump administration announced plans to issue penalties “swiftly and at scale” in June.
She spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of further reprisals from the administration, and her lawyers declined to disclose her home country to make her more difficult to identify. She said the notice came as a surprise because she was living in the United States under an order of supervision with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and through that arrangement she had been checking in annually with immigration officers for years. She is also employed and has raised a daughter in the United States but is now struggling to support her mother, who is aging.
She said that other family members in her household, who already had citizenship, had voted for Mr. Trump, believing his rhetoric that immigration operations would focus on preventing crime. Now, she said she was stepping forward with the lawsuit out of a sense of community justice.
“Everything was going fine in my case,” she said in Spanish, speaking through an interpreter. “But now that this happened, all of a sudden it’s like I’ve fallen into an abyss.”
The other plaintiff, identified as Maria L., is in the process of pursuing a less routine form of humanitarian relief that would allow her to seek lawful permanent residency, according to the lawsuit.
Her notice informed her she owed a figure in “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” After she tried to appeal, she received an invoice from the Department of Homeland Security in response, informing her that the “debt is final” and “payment in full is due now.”
Both women are subject to a “final order of removal,” according to the complaint, meaning their cases were previously considered in immigration court. The suit notes that federal law nonetheless allows people with final orders of removal to apply for certain types of waivers and protection from deportation.
The lawsuit argues that the fines violate migrants’ due process rights and the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits government-issued fines that are “grossly disproportionate to the gravity” of the offense. The suit also claims that the government rushed to impose the policy without public comment, “adopting overnight a flawed new policy of imposing excessive fines while gutting what process had been available to targeted individuals under prior, longstanding regulations.”
Lawyers from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center joined the two women as plaintiffs in the case, with representation by Public Justice and the Legal Aid Society, among others.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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