Voluntary departures hit record high as detained immigrants lose hope of getting released or winning in court

As pathways to freedom have narrowed in immigration courts across the United States, a record number of detainees are giving up their cases and voluntarily leaving the country. Last year, 28% of completed immigration removal cases among those in detention ended in voluntary departure, a higher share than in any year prior, a CBS News analysis of decades of court records found. That figure only appears to be climbing as the Trump administration's immigration crackdown widens and detention populations swell. The percentage of voluntary departures among those detained grew nearly every month of 2025, reaching 38% in December. The analysis does not include those who were not given a hearing before an immigration judge, such as immigrants in expedited removal proceedings. "It's set up for every individual who is detained to get to the point where they're just emotionally drained and exhausted through it all of the way that we're being treated, to just say, 'OK, all I want is my freedom,'" said Vilma Palacios, who agreed to return to Honduras in late December after being detained for six months in Basile, Louisiana. Detained cases ending in voluntary removal View monthly rate 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 0 5 10 15 20 25 30% 28% Chart: Julia Ingram / CBS NewsSource: Executive Office for Immigration Review Palacios, 22, had been in the U.S. since she was 6 years old. Last June, a month after she graduated from nursing school at Louisiana State University, ICE agents arrested her at a local police station after she brought in a car for a routine inspection. She has no criminal record. Palacios said she and her family were apprehended and detained for a month at the border when they arrived in 2010 but were released and pursued an asylum case in the years following. Court records show her case was administratively closed in 2015, when she was 12 years old, meaning it was taken off the docket indefinitely. In a statement to CBS News, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson wrote that Palacios "freely admitted to being in the U.S. illegally" and "never sought or gained any legal status." The video player is currently playing an ad. Palacios pushed back on claims that she never sought legal status, saying she had been awaiting a work permit renewal when she was arrested. Since then, Palacios says she had an immigration attorney helping her navigate the immigration court proceeding process and thought she was doing everything necessary to remain in the U.S. lawfully. She says she was shocked when immigration agents detained her. She said her subsequent six-month stay in detention — during which she had no contact with family or friends — was emotionally exhausting. "Everything was taken from me, like being ripped apart from every person that I loved, and being surrounded with people that I had never met in my life, and [ICE] having control over every movement that I made, was just something very difficult to me," she said. "It got to the point where I didn't see that I had no other option but just to say, OK, just please give me my freedom back." Palacios said she tried to offer medical care to fellow detainees in need when they faced delays in accessing doctors and nurses, but detention facility staff told her not to. "Many women would always come up to me, or come up to the officers, and complain about the waiting time, that they weren't receiving the treatment that they needed, that they were sick, and still had to wait two, three, four weeks, even months after, to be called," Palacios said. About 73,000 people were being held in ICE detention in mid-January, the highest level ever recorded by DHS, CBS News previously reported. "The conditions in the detention centers have never ever been worse because they're so overcrowded," said Jen Grant, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society in New York. Palacios asked an immigration judge for a bond for her release from detention, but her request was denied. "They weren't looking at the roots that I created in the United States," Palacios said. "The job that I had lined up, the career, the life that I had built for myself, they never took nothing into consideration." She's not the only one who struggled to get out of detention while her case was pending. Last year, 30% of rulings on bond were favorable to detainees, down from 59% in 2024, the CBS News analysis found. Under the Trump administration, DHS has moved to subject anyone who entered the U.S. illegally to mandatory detention, rather than only those apprehended near the border, removing judges' authority to grant bond. In December, a California district judge ruled that DHS's sweeping use of mandatory detention is unlawful, but the chief immigration judge issued guidance telling immigration judges the ruling was not binding, according to a memo obtained by the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Judges may also be afraid to rule out of step with the administration's deportation agenda, Grant said, as the Trump administration has fired dozens of judges. A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation's immigration courts, wrote in a statement that "immigration judges are independent adjudicators and decide all matters before them, including requests for voluntary departure, on a case-by-case basis, according to U.S. immigration law, regulations, and precedent decisions." DHS did not respond to inquiries about the increase in voluntary departures and use of mandatory detention. Many detainees are seeking release by filing habeas corpus petitions in federal court, which compel a judge to evaluate the legality of their detention. In some cases, that shifts the burden of proof onto the government to show that a detainee is a flight risk. But not everyone has the resources to file a habeas corpus petition, Grant said, and not all petitions are successful. One immigrant who asked that CBS News identify her only by her initials, U.G., as she is still seeking legal pathways to appeal her deportation, was relieved when a judge finally ordered for her deportation after 13 months in detention. Although she didn't ask for voluntary departure, at one point she tried to convince her legal team to ask for her removal. "I couldn't fathom just continuing to sit there," she said. "Every day that I sit here, I'm choosing to sit here. I can sign and have them remove me in three days." Even if she had been granted her claim for relief, she believed DHS would appeal it, leaving her in detention for even longer, or try to send her to a country other than her native Mexico, she said. "They believe that the likelihood of them winning their case is so much lower than it ever used to be," attorney Christopher Kinnison said of some of his clients. He has been working as an immigration lawyer in Louisiana for 15 years. Many of the people in removal proceedings are seeking asylum, and asylum grant rates have plummeted, according to immigration court data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. More than half of asylum requests were granted each month from 2022 to 2024, but 29% were granted by December 2025. In recent months, DHS has also moved to cut thousands of asylum cases short by asking judges to send asylum seekers to third countries. Successful asylum and bond requests plummet in 2025 Figures represent share of total decisions Chart: Julia Ingram / CBS NewsSource: Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Executive Office for Immigration Review "People have no hope," Grant said. "It's from seeing other people in court who fight their cases, who get their cases denied, who have bond hearings ... and then they get denied." After a judge granted Palacios' request for voluntary departure, she was flown to Honduras in handcuffs, with additional metal chains around her waist and feet. "It's something that I feel like it's very inhumane, the way that we are shackled and brought to our country," she said. "It doesn't seem like it's a voluntary departure. It seemed that you're still being held as a criminal, kind of like a hostage." Now in a country that she can hardly remember, Palacios is beginning to rebuild her life, even volunteering at a local toy drive in her new community. Pacios did not appeal her case after being sent back to Honduras, but she tells CBS News she hasn't given up hope of returning to the U.S. one day. "My goal and dream is still to be a nurse in the United States," Palacios said. "If I receive an opportunity here, to be able to gain experience, in the meantime, to be able to continue making an impact… to be able to help those in need, I always say, why not?" For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

How the head of ICE responded to questions in Congress over Trump’s immigration policies

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s top immigration officials appeared before Congress Tuesday for the first time since the shooting deaths of two American citizens in Minneapolis, seeking to defend their officers’ actions as their agencies face intensifying scrutiny over nationwide immigration enforcement operations. Todd Lyons, who is the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, came in for some of the sharpest questioning during a more than 3-hour-long hearing in front of the House Homeland Security Committee. He appeared alongside Rodney Scott, who heads Customs and Border Protection, and Joseph Edlow, who leads U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Lawmakers asked them about issues that have dominated the public discourse since Trump launched his mass deportations agenda at the start of his second term. Here are some of their answers. Defending officers after 2 Americans were killed in Minneapolis Lyons and Scott faced scrutiny over the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti but they repeatedly declined to answer questions, citing active investigations. Lyons was asked if he would apologize for the way some Trump administration officials characterized Good as an agitator, which he declined to do. “I welcome the opportunity to speak to the family in private. But I’m not going to comment on any active investigation,” Lyons said. Lyons said he had seen the video that captured Pretti’s shooting but said he could not comment because of the ongoing investigation. Related Stories ICE chief defends his officers' actions before Congress after the deaths of 2 protesters ICE chief defends his officers' actions before Congress after the deaths of 2 protesters The shootings in Minneapolis are upending the politics of immigration in Congress The shootings in Minneapolis are upending the politics of immigration in Congress Senate passes Trump-backed government funding deal, sending to House Senate passes Trump-backed government funding deal, sending to House Masks worn by immigration officers Democrats painted masked officers as lawless and unaccountable. Republicans said masks are needed to protect officers from doxing. Asked if he would commit to making his officers take off their masks and requiring them to wear “standard uniforms with identifiable badges,” Lyons answered with one word: “No.” Lyons has said repeatedly that he supports officers who feel that they need to wear masks to protect their identities and their families. Body cameras being deployed to officers Lyons and Scott said thousands of federal immigration officers are already outfitted with body cameras, with more to come. Lyons said the body camera footage caught in Minneapolis would be released to the public. “That’s one thing that I’m committed to is full transparency. And I fully welcome body cameras all across the spectrum in all of our law enforcement activities,” Lyons said. Lyons denies 5-year-old boy was used as bait The case of Liam Conejo Ramos, who was wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack while he was surrounded by immigration officers, has sparked controversy over the administration’s crackdown in Minnesota. The boy and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, who originally is from Ecuador, were detained in a Minneapolis suburb on Jan. 20. Asked about the case, Lyons denied that the boy was used as bait to get one of the parents out of the house, as neighbors and school officials have alleged. “He was obviously upset. We comforted him. The officers actually placed him in one of our vehicles, played his favorite song, favorite music. Then they took him to McDonald’s,” Lyons said. A DHS funding lapse will threaten the country’s security, officials said The congressional hearing took place in the shadow of a looming government shutdown that would only affect the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats are threatening to block funding for the department when it expires unless there are more restraints for ICE and other law enforcement agencies carrying out Trump’s federal immigration agenda. Republican Rep. Michael Guest of Mississippi blamed Democrats for a possible shutdown and asked the agency heads whether such a shutdown would make the country less safe. They all answered that it would. “It will have a great impact,” said Lyons. He said a shutdown would particularly harm the department’s task forces on transnational crimes and terrorism. ICE at the World Cup Lyons was asked if he would agree to pausing ICE operations during this year’s FIFA World Cup. A Democratic lawmaker said visitors were concerned by ICE’s tactics. But Lyons declined to commit to a pause. “ICE is dedicated to ensuring that everyone that visits the facilities will have a safe and secure event,” Lyons said. Questions over guarding voting precincts With Trump’s call for the federal government to “take over” elections, the ranking member of the committee, Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, asked the officials to answer if they are involved in any efforts to guard voting precincts, with the midterms set for later this year. “You’ve not been asked to start deploying people for areas anywhere?” Thompson asked.

Trump administration names 33 new immigration judges, most with military backgrounds

Feb 5 (Reuters) - The Justice Department has hired 33 new immigration judges, including 27 temporary ones, after firing or pushing out more than 100 others as the Trump administration seeks out new recruits to serve as what it dubs "deportation judges." The Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review said the new immigration judges were sworn in on Thursday, following the October hiring of 36 immigration judges, including 25 temporary ones, after months of workforce cuts. Jumpstart your morning with the latest legal news delivered straight to your inbox from The Daily Docket newsletter. Sign up here. Advertisement · Scroll to continue The new judges will serve in immigration courts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington. "After four years of Biden administration hiring practices that undermined the credibility and impartiality of the immigration courts, this Department of Justice continues to restore integrity to our immigration system and is proud to welcome these talented immigration judges to join in our mission of protecting national security and public safety," a Justice Department spokesperson said. Half of the new permanent judges have a military background, as do 100% of the temporary judges who can serve up to six months. Advertisement · Scroll to continue The Pentagon in September had said that military and civilian lawyers working for the U.S. Defense Department under the leadership of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would temporarily serve as immigration judges.More than 100 immigration judges out of about 700 have been fired or pushed out since President Donald Trump's return to office in January 2025, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a move that the organization says has depleted the number of judges available to handle a surge in cases as the administration ramps up arrests and deportations. The immigration courts face a backlog of about 3.2 million cases as of December 31, according to data from Mobile Pathways, a nonprofit that analyzes immigration court data and promotes access to justice for immigrants. 00:01 Ryan Routh's lawyer to appeal his conviction and sentence The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard Under Trump, thousands of migrants who in the past would have been eligible for release on bond have been subjected to mandatory detention after the Board of Immigration Appeals in September issued a ruling reinterpreting a key statute in a way that hundreds of judges in the federal courts have ruled is wrong. The Trump administration plans to publish a fast-track regulation on Friday that would cut the time for someone to appeal an immigration judge's decision to 10 days and make it easier for the appeals board to dismiss appeals. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

ICE Begins Buying ‘Mega’ Warehouse Detention Centers Across US

Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history. The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents in Minneapolis and other cities. Those aggressive enforcement actions have ignited clashes with protesters and led to agents killing two US citizens. On Jan. 16, the administration paid $102 million for a site near Hagerstown, Maryland, according to a local court filing. A week later, the government paid $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona. The price tags — roughly in line with the industry average for the warehouse market — cover just the acquisition of the sites, which are currently empty shells. ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas and then run them as detention centers. 0130_CITYLAB_ICE WAREHOUSES US Senator Chris Van Hollen speaks to protesters against ICE in Hagerstown on Jan. 20.Source: Office of US Senator Chris Van Hollen The El Paso site was purchased by the Department of Homeland Security recently, according to people familiar with the transaction who asked not to be named discussing a confidential process. But the sale price hasn’t yet been made public. As the political pressure intensifies, some deals are collapsing. Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison’s company said Friday that a transaction to sell its 550,000-square-foot warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, “will not be proceeding.” Earlier in the week, the company had said it had initially agreed to sell the facility to a US government contractor but that “some time later, we became aware of the ultimate owner and intended use of the building.” It added: “We understand that the conversation around immigration policy and enforcement is particularly heated, and has become much more so over the past few weeks. We respect that this issue is deeply important to many people.” On Thursday, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt said he’d met with the owners of a warehouse identified by ICE who told him they were no longer going to sell or lease the facility to the agency. “I commend the owners for their decision and thank them on behalf of the people of Oklahoma City,” Holt said. “I ask that every single property owner in Oklahoma City exhibit the same concern for our community in the days ahead.” The warehouses, many of which originally were designed and marketed as e-commerce distribution facilities, represent a significant pivot for the administration’s $45 billion immigration detention buildout. Last year, it relied on tent camps constructed in remote places like the Florida Everglades and an Army base in Texas. ICE Pivots To Warehouses Warehouses identified by ICE to convert into immigration detention facilities Source: Bloomberg reporting Note: The 23 sites depicted are part of the agency's warehouse plans. Sites could be changed or removed. Little has been publicly shared about ICE’s plans for the new detention centers in small towns and cities across the country. Already, many residents have voiced opposition and local leaders are considering options to prevent the agency from using them. The concerns include both immigration politics as well as land-use issues — proximity to homes and schools, and questions of sewer capacity and water demand. Given such pushback and the logistical challenges, there’s no guarantee each of the 23 sites will be converted. More than 200 people showed up to protest the warehouse plans in Hagerstown on Jan. 20 in below-freezing temperatures. “One of the most obscene, one of the most inhumane, one of the most illegal operations being carried out by this Trump Administration is what they’re doing at the Department of Homeland Security and ICE,” US Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, told the protesters. “We do not want an ICE facility here in the state of Maryland.” DHS and ICE didn’t respond to a detailed request for comment. Neither did the companies that sold the properties in Maryland, Arizona and Texas — Fundrise, Rockefeller Group and Flint Development, respectively. The 23 proposed sites would range in size from 500 to 9,500 beds. If completed as planned, the larger facilities would be some of the biggest detention centers of any kind in the country. For example, the 9,500-bed facility ICE is planning for Hutchins, Texas, could fit the entire average daily jail population of Dallas County with thousands of beds to spare. In recent weeks the federal government has given tours of potential sites in more than 20 cities to contractors and shared with them the designs, including preferred layouts, for at least 15 of the sites, according to people familiar with the confidential process. Contractors — the ones who will turn these warehouses into jails — were required to send in their proposals for the first sites this week, starting with Hagerstown, according to those sources. To reach its goal of deporting 1 million people a year, the Trump administration has said it needs more than 100,000 detention beds. Currently, there are more than 73,000 people in ICE custody, a record. The new sites could give the agency an additional 76,500 beds, according to documents shared with Bloomberg News. To fill all of them, the administration would have to expand immigration arrests beyond what it is already doing, said Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council. “To reach these kinds of numbers, they’d need to go out into the communities and find people who’ve been living their lives and been here a long time,” Winger said. “They’d have to dramatically increase their presence in communities across the country.” ICE and Customs and Border Protection have already ramped up their presence and arrests on American streets. The estimated 3,000 immigration agents deployed in Minneapolis-St. Paul is roughly 10 times the number sent last September to Chicago, a significantly larger city. In January alone, federal immigration agents in the Twin Cities fatally shot two people, Renée Good and Alex Pretti. At least six people have died nationwide since Trump’s crackdown began. As the administration increases its law enforcement efforts on the ground, it’s also casting a wider net for the types of people who could end up in detention. More than 1 million people have had their temporary immigration statuses canceled since Trump returned to office, putting them at risk of deportation. Immigration officers have also arrested immigrants at routine court appearances and check-ins. More recently, in Minnesota, DHS said it’s targeting 5,600 immigrants to reverify their status claims. That has resulted in some people with legal status getting arrested, jailed and flown to Texas for interviews before being released and forced to pay their own way home, according to lawyers and advocates. Cities Identified by ICE These 23 locales were named in plans for warehouse-based jails Source: Bloomberg reporting Note: * Owners of the facilities ICE identified in these cities say they have no plans to sell to the agency. This list is based on ICE's plans and may change. Some of the cities are approximate locations, based on nearest municipality. Unlike the cities where ICE and CBP agents have fanned out for arrest operations in recent months, many of the locations ICE has identified for its warehouse jails are in Republican-leaning areas. Still, residents in many of the chosen municipalities have been trying to block ICE’s arrival. This month, demonstrators protested warehouse conversions in New Hampshire, Utah, Texas and Georgia after the Washington Post published an earlier version of the conversion plan. In mid-January, a planned tour for contractors of a potential warehouse site in San Antonio was canceled after protesters showed up the same day, according to a person familiar with the scheduled visit. In Salt Lake City, the Ritchie Group, a local family business that owns the warehouse ICE identified as a future “mega center” jail, said it had “no plans to sell or lease the property in question to the federal government” after protesters showed up at their offices to pressure them. Earlier in January, in Merrimack, New Hampshire, around 1,200 people protested the conversion of a warehouse owned by real estate giant CBRE. In the Village of Chester, New York, residents attended a community meeting to call on their leaders to stop ICE’s plans in any way they could. The more than 400,000-square-foot warehouse that ICE has its eyes on there is owned by the holding company of billionaire and former Trump adviser Carl Icahn. Social Circle, Georgia, is one of the 15 locations where ICE has shared design details with contractors. Marketing materials for the warehouse there — as well as brochures for sites in Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Texas and Pennsylvania — highlight the suitability for commerce, distribution and logistics. Some of them cite their proximity to large stores such as Walmart. Eric Taylor, Social Circle’s city manager, said this week that he still hadn’t received any communication from federal officials about plans there for an 8,500-bed detention center. Taylor said the town of roughly 5,000 people doesn’t have the infrastructure to host the planned facility. The city has 17 sworn police officers and 14 firefighters, and its water and sewage capacity is already maxed out, Taylor said, adding that property taxes on the warehouse would drop to zero if acquired by the federal government. The building is also close to the town’s new elementary school. Proposed Detention Center Could Overwhelm Small Georgia Town Sources: Google Earth Pro, Bloomberg reporting Local governments are limited in what they can do to prevent ICE from opening and operating a detention facility, even if it doesn’t meet local zoning requirements. That’s because federal actions typically supersede local rules, though it can become more complicated when private companies are doing things on behalf of the federal government. Municipalities will have other tools to stall or inhibit ICE’s work: The federal government can’t force a municipality to build a new public road or other utilities because a facility needs it. And many of the warehouses have their sewage and water systems serviced by municipalities, which means they could have a say over whether it has the capacity to meet a large jail’s demands. The Trump administration’s push to make 3,000 immigration arrests per day — and its insistence that those adjudicating their cases do so from detention — has created an intense demand for jail space. It has gone through multiple iterations of plans to massively expand its detention capacity. In the early days of Trump’s second term, ICE leveraged longstanding relationships with private prison companies such as CoreCivic and Geo Group to boost detention space. Those companies gave ICE access to additional beds in their existing jails, purchased and leased new facilities and reopened shuttered ones. Those companies said in November earnings calls that they still have a total of more than 30,000 beds that they could bring online, if asked by the federal government. “We continue to believe that detention beds like these represent the best value and are the most humane, most efficient logistically, have the highest audit compliance scores in their system, are more secure, weatherproof and are readily available,” then-CoreCivic Chief Executive Officer Damon Hininger said on his company’s earnings call. Yet, by the middle of last year, the Trump administration had pivoted to a plan that was outlined in Project 2025: using soft-sided facilities, or tents, to quickly erect new detention camps. ICE created a shortlist of potential partners, which included a number of companies that typically build emergency tent camps in the wake of natural disasters. Two large tent camps grew out of that strategy shift: a state-run facility in the Florida Everglades nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republicans and a federally run camp on a military base in El Paso, Texas. Both have been plagued by allegations of inhumane conditions and mismanagement. Aerial views of ICE detention facility in Fort Bliss, Texas An aerial view shows an ICE detention facility being built to house immigrants at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, last August.Photographer: Paul Ratje/REUTERS At El Paso’s Camp East Montana, now the largest US immigration detention facility with about 3,000 people detained daily, the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocates allege a pattern of excessive force, sexual abuse and threats to coerce non-Mexican nationals to cross into the Mexican desert. ICE has denied allegations of abuse and said all people being deported are given due-process protections. At least three people have died at the camp over the past two months. On Jan. 3, Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban immigrant, died at the facility following a struggle with detention staff. Federal officials told the Washington Post that officers were attempting to restrain Campos during a suicide attempt. An autopsy report later released by the El Paso County medical examiner’s office stated his death was a homicide and that he was asphyxiated after being restrained by law enforcement. On Jan. 14, Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, died in what ICE also said was a presumed suicide. Get the Morning & Evening Briefing Americas newsletters. Start every morning with what you need to know followed by context and analysis on news of the day each evening. Plus, Bloomberg Weekend. Enter your email By continuing, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. These incidents come amid a rising number of deaths in ICE detention since Trump returned to the White House. More than 30 people died in detention last year, the highest figure in two decades, and Campos and Diaz are two of the six people who have died in the agency’s custody since the beginning of the year. A report from the American Immigration Council attributes the cause of many of last year’s deaths to ICE’s failure to provide adequate medical care. Winger, the council’s deputy legal director, said she expects dangers will persist, especially considering the capacity that ICE is planning for the new warehouse detention facilities. “I suppose there’s ways to build enough toilets and private places,” she said. “But the various health needs of people in these facilities and ensuring that you even know who you’re holding and who has vulnerabilities and who needs medication — it just seems impossible.” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

Judge orders 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his dad released from ICE detention

A 5-year-old boy and his father must be released by Tuesday from the Texas center where they’ve been held after being detained by immigration officers in Minnesota, a federal judge ordered Saturday in a ruling that harshly criticized the Trump administration’s approach to enforcement. Images of Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, being surrounded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers sparked even more outcry about the administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who sits in San Antonio and was appointed by former Democratic President Bill Clinton, said in his ruling that “the case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.” Biery had previously ruled that the boy and his father could not be removed from the U.S., at least for now. Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, who is originally from Ecuador, were detained in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights on Jan. 20. They were taken to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas. Related Stories 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and father return to Minnesota from ICE facility in Texas 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and father return to Minnesota from ICE facility in Texas What Trump officials and immigration lawyers say about ICE detaining a 5-year-old What Trump officials and immigration lawyers say about ICE detaining a 5-year-old Father of 5-year-old detained in Minnesota disputes government assertion he abandoned the boy Father of 5-year-old detained in Minnesota disputes government assertion he abandoned the boy Neighbors and school officials say that federal immigration officers used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer. The Department of Homeland Security has called that description of events an “abject lie.” It said the father fled on foot and left the boy in a running vehicle in their driveway. The government says Arias entered the U.S. illegally from Ecuador in December 2024. The family’s lawyer says he has a pending asylum claim that allows him to remain in the country. Their detention led to a protest at the Texas family detention center and a visit by two Texas Democratic members of Congress. In his order Saturday, Biery said: “apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence,” suggesting the Trump administration’s actions echo those that then-author and future President Thomas Jefferson enumerated as grievances against England’s King George. Among them: “He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People” and “He has excited domestic Insurrection among us.” Biery included in his ruling a photo of Liam and references to two lines in the Bible: “Jesus said, ’Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” and “Jesus wept.” He’s not the only federal judge who has been tough on ICE recently. A Minnesota-based judge with a conservative pedigree described the agency as a serial violator of court orders related to the crackdown. Stephen Miller, the White House chief of staff for policy, has said there’s a target of 3,000 immigration arrests a day. It’s that figure which the judge seemed to refer to as a “quota.” Spokespersons from the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately reply to requests for comment. The Law Firm of Jennifer Scarborough, which is representing the boy and his family, said in a statement that it was working “to ensure a safe and timely reunion.” “We are pleased that the family will now be able to focus on being together and finding some peace after this traumatic ordeal,” they said. During Wednesday’s visit by Texas Reps. Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett, the boy slept in the arms of his father, who said Liam was frequently tired and not eating well at the detention facility that houses about 1,100 people, according to Castro. Detained families report poor conditions like worms in food, fighting for clean water and poor medical care at the detention center since its reopening last year. In December, a report filed by ICE acknowledged they held about 400 children longer than the recommended limit of 20 days. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

Trump’s immigration approach is gumming up the courts, frustrating his Justice Department and judges

The Justice Department and federal courts are struggling to keep up with the exponential increase in federal court cases of immigrants in custody who are challenging their detentions – another result of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies across the country. The cases, in which a person can challenge detention in the jurisdiction where they are physically held, through what’s called a habeas corpus petition, have skyrocketed in Minneapolis and Texas over the past three weeks, several attorneys responding to the surge say and court records show. “There has been a shift. It’s happened all so fast,” said Jacqueline Watson, an attorney in Austin, Texas, and board member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Related live story A CNN Town Hall in Minneapolis on January 28, 2026. Rep. Omar attacked in Minnesota as Trump says he wants to de-escalate state tensions The increase in the habeas cases in federal court has exposed how the justice system and the Trump administration are straining to respond to the White House and Department of Homeland Security’s escalation of immigration arrests. The situation has become especially acute this month with the Operation Metro Surge campaign in Minnesota, where the Trump administration has sent more than 3,000 Homeland Security border and immigration officers to the Twin Cities, and as immigrants arrested in Minnesota and elsewhere are being moved to federal detention facilities near the US-Mexico border. “I’ve seen people (in court representing DOJ) I’ve never heard of. The cases are just getting sent to whatever attorneys can handle the workload within the district,” Watson said of the prosecutors now being tasked to respond to immigration detention challenges in the Western District of Texas. “The volume slows down already scarce court resources.” At least one US attorney in a district on the US-Mexico border has raised the possibility that the Justice Department, which must respond to the federal court cases individually, may need to discuss changes in approach at the Department of Homeland Security, which takes immigrants into custody, according to internal DOJ discussions described to CNN. Since January 1, more than 400 detainees have filed habeas petitions in the federal court in Minnesota, often seeking bond hearings or to be released, according to the court’s public docket. There were just over 125 habeas petitions in the state during all of last year. Federal courts near the border have seen similar increases. In December, US attorneys from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi told an appeals court that their prosecutors were struggling to field responses to immigrants’ detention challenges. “To respond to this wave of habeas petitions, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has been forced to shift its already limited resources from other pressing and important priorities,” Justin Simmons, the Trump-appointed US Attorney for the Western District of Texas, wrote to the Fifth Circuit, describing how he’s moved civil and criminal attorneys in his office to full-time habeas case duty. Homeland Security officials are far more likely to make arrests and keep a person who has no criminal history in detention under the Trump administration. And a DHS policy change last summer now allows far fewer detainees to be eligible for bond hearings in immigration courts, which exist within the Justice Department and outside the federal court system. As a result, people in custody are now more likely to file an emergency petition with the federal district court where they are being held. The judges then hear from the Justice Department and from the immigrant’s lawyer to determine if the person should be released or receive a bond hearing, with proceedings and responses needing to happen within days. Last week, detainees filed nearly 180 new habeas petitions in the Western District, according to court records. And the week before, 125 new habeas petitions were filed in the court, Simmons’ office announced in a press release. US Attorneys’ offices with major increases of immigrants in DHS detention have been pushing for additional prosecutors as well, but lawyers alone may not be enough, according to a source familiar with the discussions at the Justice Department. Justice Department spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment this week on the increase in immigration detention cases in the federal justice system. DOJ has, however, called for more attorneys from other midwestern US attorneys offices to go to Minnesota during the immigration arrest surge, CNN has reported. A frustrated judge A federal judge on Monday called out the Trump administration for not being prepared for the onslaught of new habeas petitions. The administration, wrote chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, “decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.” “The scale we’re talking about is not what we’ve ever seen before. And it’s just the pure amount of enforcement going on,” My Khanh Ngo, an attorney with the ACLU who is working on dozens of habeas cases for people in custody. On Monday, Schiltz noted how line prosecutors from the US Attorney’s Office in the Twin Cities have struggled to respond on the Justice Department’s behalf. The US Attorney’s Office has “struggled mightily to ensure that respondents comply with court orders despite the fact that (the Trump administration) have failed to provide them with adequate resources,” Schiltz wrote in a court order in the case of a man from Ecuador who had come to the US as a child nearly 30 years ago. Patrick Schiltz serves as the chief United States district judge of the US District Court for the District of Minnesota. Patrick Schiltz serves as the chief United States district judge of the US District Court for the District of Minnesota. US District Court for the District of Minnesota The man was detained and had been in ICE custody since early January, and Schiltz decided he should have a bond hearing or be released. But neither had happened for three weeks. “The Court’s patience is at an end,” Schiltz said. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

'Two too many.' ICE raids drive wedge in 2026 battleground races

President Donald Trump's stern nationwide campaign against illegal immigration has reached boiling temperatures that could scald Republicans in battleground states and districts ahead of the 2026 midterms. Outrage over immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere had been building among Democrats and progressives for months, but the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti this month have further exposed the country's raw nerves. Surveys show a large share of Americans are uncomfortable with the Trump administration's approach to deportation, such as a Jan. 13 poll by Quinnipiac University that found 57% of voters disapprove of the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement is enforcing immigration laws, versus 40% who approve. That discontent is likely to continue spilling over this week, whether in Congress or across the nation, as the administration reportedly reconfigures tactics and messaging amid a public backlash. After top administration officials initially defended Pretti's killing by alleging − in apparent contrast to what video of his shooting shows − that the victim was a "would-be assassin" who "committed an act of domestic terrorism," White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a Jan. 26 press conference that no one in the administration, including the president, wants to see people getting hurt or killed in America’s streets. Wary Republican lawmakers, candidates and other figures had already begun mapping the fallout by taking a noticeable tone shift, either calling for investigations or suggesting the White House back off. "Escalating the rhetoric doesn't help and it actually loses credibility," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said during a Jan. 25 episode of his podcast, "The Verdict" a day after Pretti's shooting. "And so, I would encourage the administration to be more measured, to recognize the tragedy and to say, 'we don't want anyone's lives to be lost.'" Others have asserted that the pair of killings is too much to withstand, however. "I cannot support the national Republicans' stated retribution on the citizens of our state nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so," Chris Madel, a Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, said in a Jan. 26 video message posted on X, where he announced dropping out of the campaign for the GOP nomination. Get the Susan Page newsletter in your inbox. Get the latest story from Susan Page right in your inbox. Delivery: Varies Your Email Madel, a trial attorney who represented the immigration officer who fatally shot Good on Jan. 7, said ICE's efforts have expanded far beyond the agency's original focus. He said it has caused U.S. citizens, "particularly those of color," to live in fear and made it impossible for a Republican contender to win in Minnesota. "Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota has been an unmitigated disaster," he said. As the on-street clashes intensify, Republican candidates in toss-up contests are now being watched for how they are teetering on the issue. But strategists say not to expect most Republicans to back down in defending the president's biggest campaign promise, even as some conservatives share their misgivings publicly about some aggressive tactics and fatal outcomes. John Feehery, a former top Republican congressional aide turned GOP strategist, told USA TODAY he doesn't expect a significant herd of conservatives to break with Trump, but it will become a political disaster in the fall if the White House doesn't get a better handle on these enforcement operations. "There's an element you're seeing where Republicans acknowledge we need to be smarter about this," he said. "Then there are the personal reactions, you know, people don't want to see liberal protesters get gunned down and they don't like it. I don't blame them. I don't like it either." 'Two too many': Minnesota GOP contenders slam Democratic leaders Federal agents hold a person down as immigration enforcement continues after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 during an immigration raid, in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Jan. 21, 2026. Other Republicans running for office in the Land of 10,000 Lakes were steadfast in supporting the president's massive deportation effort, even as Trump was beginning to pivot. They argue that rather than encouraging demonstrators or blaming the Trump administration for flooding areas with ICE agents, state and local officials should cooperate with the president in apprehending those living in the U.S. illegally to avoid further violence. In a Jan. 24 message hours after Pretti's shooting, former sportscaster Michele Tafoya, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, encouraged people to "stay away from the affected areas, and wait for the facts." She pointed out that Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey were both in office in 2020 when clashes occurred amid protests against the murder of George Floyd. "We can never let that happen again," Tafoya said. David Hann, a former Minnesota Republican Party chairman, who is also running in the Aug. 11 GOP Senate primary, said the pair of killings was "two too many." While he stated that "Minnesotans are not political pawns," he reiterated that calming the waters is mainly a responsibility of Democratic leaders in the state rather than the Trump administration. Trump's supporters in Minnesota are pointing to a potential reset since the president announced he is dispatching Tom Homan, the administration's so-called border czar, to oversee operations in Minnesota following the second fatal shooting. "It's certainly a great opportunity for Walz, Frey, and the rest to reset their stance and begin taking federal authority seriously. We'll see," Walter Hudson, a GOP Minnesota legislator, who has defended the crackdown, said in a Jan. 26 post on X. By the late afternoon, Walz and his team had announced the governor had spoken with Trump after months of bitter verbal jabs, saying the president would consider reducing the number of immigration agents in the state. The governor's office said they were also assured Minnesota investigators can independently probe the Pretti shooting. Collins staying mostly quiet as ICE operations swarm Maine US Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, stands alongside US President Donald Trump as he signs bills intended to lower prescription drug prices during a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, October 10, 2018. The administration's next steps will be critical, GOP strategists say, especially as voters weigh the responses by Republicans in battleground areas where ICE deployments are taking place. In the wake of Good's death, the administration launched another immigration enforcement operation in Maine, where the parties are locked in a battle over the Senate seat currently held by five-term GOP incumbent Susan Collins, a moderate known for occasionally breaking with Trump. Dubbed "Operation Catch of the Day," the administration did not announce how many ICE agents were sent to the Pine Tree State, nor did it outline where its operations would be focused or how long the mission would last. "The brave men and women of ICE have already arrested more than 200 illegal aliens in Maine in the last five days," the Department of Homeland Security announced Monday afternoon. While the department says it is gathering "the worst of the worst," immigrant advocates in Maine say most of those arrested are in legal immigration processes and have no criminal record, and that many have been racially profiled and subjected to inhumane conditions in detention. The Collins campaign did not respond to USA TODAY's request for comment and the senator hasn't issued a new statement since the second shooting in Minnesota. In the wake of Good's death, Collins issued a statement echoing some of the administration's talking points, saying people who are protesting, "should be careful not to interfere with law enforcement efforts while doing so." But the agency's deployment into Maine has ignited a furious response from the top two Democrats seeking to boot Collins from office, which may determine the balance of the Senate later this year. "It's simple -- Congress needs to stand up today and tell this president that Kristi Noem must go and ICE must be withdrawn," said Gov. Janet Mills, a Trump foil who was recruited to run by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, in a Jan. 26 interview on MS Now's (formerly MSNBC) Morning Joe. She has criticized Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, for not taking part in the Democrat-led effort to withhold ICE funding unless new safeguards are added to its tactics. Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, a more populist-aligned Democratic contender supported by grassroots progressives, said Americans have "the right and the duty to resist ICE." "People need to get off the couch, join groups and take part," he said in an MS Now interview over the weekend. Republicans defend ICE, Trump's actions but cracks show on gun rights Attendees wearing 'MAGA' caps wait ahead of a campaign rally featuring then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S., November 4, 2024. Immigration enforcement remains one of Trump's best issues on the political right, but there are noticeable disagreements among the MAGA coalition, including concerns expressed by gun rights groups who expressed dismay that administration officials justified Pretti's shooting because he was carrying a legal firearm at the time of his death. Noem said at a news conference hours after the shooting that it is a "violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons," a notion that was denounced by conservative lawmakers and gun rights activists. In a Jan. 26 statement, former Vice President Mike Pence said the administration's focus now should be to bring together law enforcement at every level to address the community's concerns, "even while ensuring that dangerous illegal aliens are apprehended" in Minnesota. "The American people deserve to have safe streets, our laws enforced and our constitutional rights of freedom of speech, peaceable assembly and the right to keep and bear arms respected and preserved all at the same time," Pence said. Feehery, the GOP strategist, said Republicans by and large still support many of the enforcement activities, but that Trump will have to be more disciplined and avoid further escalation to help protect Republican candidates in swing areas. In the Quinnipiac survey, for instance, 84% of Republican voters said they approve of the way ICE is enforcing the country's immigration laws. That is the reverse of how Democrats see things, the poll shows, with 94% of Democrats and 64% of independent voters disapproving. "Immigration is one of his biggest promises and it's one of his greatest accomplishments," Feehery said. "Now it's becoming a political liability." Pretti's death has already ignited the liberal activists who are pressuring congressional Democrats, demanding they refuse to support any further ICE funding. More: ICE and Border Patrol. What makes the immigration agencies different? Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a liberal-leaning immigration reform group, said tepid Republican opposition isn't good enough, and that means Trump's opposition in Washington must be more courageous. "We are seeing what an enforcement-only, violent approach looks like in real time and Americans are rejecting that," she said. "It is absolutely reasonable for Democrats to demand that not one more penny goes to ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection." But GOP contenders are eager for Democrats in swing districts to embrace what grassroots progressives want, especially if stripping away the agency's funding leads to a budget standoff resulting in another government shutdown. Officials with the National Republican Congressional Committee, which serves as the House GOP's political arm, told USA TODAY they have been focusing on liberal incumbents and challengers in more than a dozen areas for weeks. Many have publicly criticized ICE and questioned the agency's mission, which the NRCC sees as a liability for those Democrats in competitive races. Among the top targets in 2026 will be Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman, of Ohio. After the Republican-controlled state legislature's successful redistricting effort last year, Landsman's reelection hopes became more vulnerable, according to the Cook Political Report, which forecasts races. The 49-year-old incumbent, who represents much of Cincinnati's inner suburbs, said ICE agents committed "murder" against Good and that Noem should "step down" as a result. "The radical 'abolish ICE' crusade from far-left Democrats seemed like a relic of the past, but it’s the brand-new litmus test for Democrats who are barely hanging on and begging on their knees to get approval from their socialist base," Mike Marinella, an NRCC spokesman, told USA TODAY. "The full embrace of their deeply unpopular, lunatic policies exposes the brain rot that has taken over the Democrat Party." For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

White House shows first signs of retreat as backlash grows over Minnesota killing

President Donald Trump on Monday showed his first signs of retreat since surging federal immigration agents in Minnesota late last year — replacing the leader of the crackdown on the ground and signaling new willingness to cooperate with the state’s Democratic elected officials. But the moves — which came amid an effort to contain the backlash over the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and Trump officials’ early efforts to falsely brand the ICU nurse as a “domestic terrorist” — didn’t stop the administration from continuing to try to shift blame, sparking questions about how much would change on the ground. The first test could come Tuesday. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and some of his agents are now expected to leave the city as soon as then, three sources familiar with the discussions told CNN, after Trump dispatched border czar Tom Homan to run the on-the-ground enforcement operation that has roiled Minneapolis. Sidelining Bovino could herald a move away from the heavy-handed approach that he had encouraged. Customs and Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino stands with federal officers at a gas station January 23. Customs and Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino stands with federal officers at a gas station January 23. Katie G. Nelson/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/AP The leadership change came as a relief to some at the Department of Homeland Security, who view Homan as a more experienced hand given his years in federal law enforcement. It also won praise from GOP leaders on Capitol Hill. Some White House officials, including Trump, had grown dissatisfied with the public narrative surrounding the administration’s immigration efforts even before Pretti’s killing on Saturday sparked a scramble to contain the widening fallout, a person familiar with the conversations said. On Monday, Trump spoke with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, setting aside his long-running feud with the Democrat to push for greater coordination and weigh potentially pulling at least some federal agents out of the state. “It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about the governor he had derided in recent months as “corrupt” and “grossly incompetent.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey speaks during a press conference on January 24 in Minneapolis. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey speaks during a press conference on January 24 in Minneapolis. WCCO Later in the day, he also spoke with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in what he called a “very good” conversation, writing afterward that “lots of progress is being made!” Taken together, the moves represented the first time the White House publicly reckoned with an operation that has resulted in daily confrontations with protesters and violent scenes that have unsettled even some administration officials and close Trump allies. “You’re going to have mistakes, you’re going to have messiness, but I think [Homeland Security] probably hasn’t handled it as well as it could have,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for limited immigration, criticizing the rush in particular to cast Pretti as the aggressor. “That’s the kind of thing you say when you have the actual evidence.” A picture at a makeshift memorial at the site where Alex Pretti was fatally shot in Minneapolis. A picture at a makeshift memorial at the site where Alex Pretti was fatally shot in Minneapolis. Tim Evans/Reuters In the wake of Pretti’s killing, Republican lawmakers and allies raised objections to the administration in both public and private, people familiar with the conversations said, warning the deepening crisis threatened to undermine the White House’s broader immigration efforts and cause irreparable damage to the party. Even beyond the intensifying fears of more violence on the ground, the people familiar said, Republicans vented that continuing such enforcement would backfire politically — overshadowing their efforts to amplify the fraud scandal that prompted the administration to surge federal agents into Minnesota in the first place, and further complicating the rest of Trump’s agenda. Indeed, Senate Democrats have now threatened to oppose a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security, raising the prospect of another unpredictable government shutdown in a matter of days. Several GOP lawmakers, including ardent Trump allies, have since called for investigations into the shooting, with some pushing for congressional hearings as well. “Politicians, protesters, and law enforcement all have an obligation to deescalate the situation in Minnesota,” Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota wrote on X. “As with any officer-involved shooting, this demands a thorough investigation.” Administration officials on Monday also shifted notably away from their initial portrayal of Pretti as an attacker who brandished a gun at federal agents — though they maintained that he had invited the fatal encounter. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had not characterized Pretti as a domestic terrorist, even as she declined to explain why other administration officials — including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — had claimed he fit the definition. She emphasized that various federal agencies have since begun investigations into the shooting. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a news briefing on January 26. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a news briefing on January 26. Win McNamee/Getty Images But Leavitt still faulted Democrats and local protesters for creating the combustible environment that led to federal agents shooting Renee Good earlier this month, and now Pretti. “This tragedy occurred as a result of a deliberate and hostile resistance by Democrat leaders in Minnesota,” Leavitt said, specifically naming Walz and Frey. The attempt to moderate the administration’s rhetoric while still avoiding direct culpability underscored the challenge it faces in managing a volatile situation that threatens to consume Trump’s immigration agenda and further dent his standing on an issue that had once been his greatest strength. Polling in recent months has found growing disapproval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its tactics on the ground, even among those who supported the administration’s initial efforts to secure the southern border. Those numbers have only worsened since the fatal shooting of Good, which garnered widespread attention among Americans — relatively few of whom sided with the administration’s contention it was a proper use of force. A CNN poll published earlier this month showed 56% of those surveyed saw it instead as “inappropriate,” while just 26% viewed it as “appropriate.” Within Trump’s circle and on Capitol Hill, some Republicans viewed Homan’s appointment as an effort to stabilize an operation that had spiraled out of control and grown counterproductive under Noem and Bovino, the people familiar with the conversations said. Tom Homan, President Donald Trump's border czar, looks on as he speaks to the media outside the White House on January 14. Tom Homan, President Donald Trump's border czar, looks on as he speaks to the media outside the White House on January 14. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters “This is a positive development — one that I hope leads to turning down the temperature and restoring order in Minnesota,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune wrote on X. A veteran ICE official, Homan has advocated a strident approach to illegal immigration. But rather than the broad sweeps overseen by Bovino that have led to clashes with protesters, Homan has generally favored a greater focus on more targeted operations. Homan is set to meet with both Walz and Frey once he arrives in Minnesota, though it’s unclear what might change on the ground. The White House has indicated that it wants greater cooperation from state and local officials in deporting undocumented immigrants. Walz and Frey have insisted they’re already working with the federal government. The most immediate task facing Homan, though, allies said, will be easing tensions on the ground that have accumulated for weeks — and have now drawn the scrutiny of a nation increasingly turning against Trump and his deportation campaign. “Every day is Election Day in a sense — you can’t just say we won on this platform and now we can do whatever we want for the next two years,” Krikorian said. “If people don’t like it, you’ve got to keep persuading them.” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

Why the Trump administration is detaining immigrant children – and what happens to them next

This week, ICE’s detention of a five-year-old boy wearing a Spider Man backpack in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights quickly became a defining image of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement. Furious critics, including many local politicians, seized on Liam Ramos’s ordeal as glaring evidence that Trump’s mass deportation campaign has little to do with crime and a lot to do with terrorizing children and their families. A homeland security spokesperson said ICE officers took the boy into custody only after his father fled during an attempted arrest. The superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights said another adult living in the home was outside during the encounter and had pleaded to take care of Liam so the boy could avoid detention, but was denied. But Liam Ramos’s detention is not an isolated incident. It’s part of a uniquely aggressive push to detain more unauthorized immigrant families, a turbocharging of a policy discontinued five years ago. a young boy with a backpack View image in fullscreen Liam Conejo Ramos, five, being detained by ICE officers after arriving home from preschool on 20 January, in a Minneapolis suburb. Photograph: Ali Daniels/AP ICE booked about 3,800 minors into immigrant family detention from January to October 2025, including children as young as one or two years old, according to a Guardian analysis of records obtained by the Deportation Data Project. More than 2,600 of those minors were apprehended by ICE officers, which usually means they were apprehended somewhere inside the country rather than at the border. Those numbers mark a major shift. Previous administrations used family detention mostly to detain parents and children crossing into the United States together by land. Minors in ICE custody have special legal protections dating from a 1997 consent decree called the Flores Settlement. Under the terms of that settlement, ICE does not detain unaccompanied children. A child immigrant accompanied by a parent may be held in a detention center with somewhat higher standards than other adult facilities, but the settlement generally requires ICE to release them if the government cannot swiftly deport them. But the Trump administration is increasingly locking up families detained in high-profile immigration sweeps taking place in major cities across the country, according to Becky Wolozin, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law. “This is not people showing up at the border at this point,” Wolozin said. “It’s people being arrested who live in the United States, who have permission to live in the United States. Now, they’re starting to re-interview people who have refugee status. There’s no status that protects people any more. Even US citizens are getting arrested.” ‘It is as horrible as it looks’ Many minors may spend several days detained in places that aren’t equipped to care for children, said Sergio Perez, the executive director for the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. His organization, which represents child migrants covered by the Flores Settlement, has taken declarations from families detained for days at improvised sites in airports or office buildings. In some cases, children were forced to use the bathroom under the watch of guards of the opposite gender, Perez said. “What you’re seeing is places with no medical care, places where the lights never go out, places where the children are not allowed to go outside, places where the food is abhorrent and places where people are not treated with the dignity required by the law,” Perez said. “We’re seeing more imprisonment of families and children for longer periods of time and under more and more deplorable conditions.” Most children detained with a parent eventually end up at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, which is managed by the private prison contractor CoreCivic. Family detention centers are supposed to offer a less-jail-like setting for children, offering access to education and playgrounds. Last year, the Trump administration also detained families at a separate facility in Karnes, Texas, though it’s not clear whether ICE continues to hold families there. Homeland security did not respond to a request asking how many family detention centers it currently operates. As a lawyer representing immigrant child detainees in the ongoing litigation over their rights under the Flores Settlement, Wolozin has toured the Dilley family detention center. Constructed during Barack Obama’s second term in response to the high numbers of Central American families who began arriving at the US-Mexico border in 2014, the 2,400-bed Dilley facility is by far the largest family detention center in the country. Ramos and his father are now detained there, according to their lawyer. photos on an altar View image in fullscreen Maria García, 42, and her daughter Angela Chumil, 13, keep an altar honoring Emmanuel Gonzalez García, 15, in their north-west Houston apartment. Emmanuel was in a children’s detention center for weeks after Houston police called ICE and delivered him to federal custody, where he was declared an unaccompanied minor. Photograph: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images Many of the people who wind up there, Wolozin said, have pending asylum claims and work authorizations that prove they have complied with existing immigration laws, but were arrested anyway. Many were detained at the border patrol checkpoints that dot the highways within 100 miles (160km) of the US-Mexico border, not knowing that their work authorizations or paperwork showing they had applied for asylum or some other form of relief from removal would no longer keep them from getting detained there. Liam Ramos’s father appears to fit that pattern. His family, Ecuadorian nationals, presented themselves at the US-Mexico border using the CBP One app and then made a claim for asylum, saying they faced persecution in their home country, according to his lawyer, Marc Prokosch. “They did everything right when they came in,” Prokosch said this week at a press conference. “ICE didn’t care about the fact that they had those pending claims, and just arrested them.” The boy’s apprehension typifies the new policy of targeting immigrant families, regardless of their pending immigration claims, Wolozin said. “It is as horrible as it looks,” Wolozin said. “He’s coming home from school and now he can get abducted and detained for who knows how long and sent to somewhere he might not be safe. It’s making the United States worse than wherever they came from the first place.” Columbia Heights school officials said that ICE officers had also apprehended three other minors, according to Reuters – two 17-year-olds and a 10-year-old. ‘100% designed to hurt kids’ The modern family detention policy dates to the George W Bush administration, which established two detention centers – one in Pennsylvania, the other in Texas – to house unauthorized immigrant families together while they awaited deportation. Barack Obama scaled back family detention shortly after taking office, then dramatically increased it after the number of Central American mothers traveling with children began to surge in 2014. The first Trump administration inherited that capacity and tried unsuccessfully to overturn the provisions of the Flores Settlement in court in order to detain immigrant families until their immigration cases concluded. The first Trump administration also implemented a short-lived and widely repudiated “family separation” policy of prosecuting unauthorized immigrant parents who crossed into the United States with their children, which routed the parents into jails and their children into shelters run by the office of refugee resettlement. The Biden administration halted family immigrant detention in 2021. Now, Trump and Republicans in Congress are once again attempting to scrap the Flores Settlement’s restrictions. Last year’s “One Big, Beautiful” spending bill directs ICE to hold families “until such aliens are removed”, which directly contradicts the settlement. The bill quadrupled ICE’s immigrant detention budget to $45bn and allowed any portion of that appropriation to be used to detain families. “These are just families,” Wolozin said. “They’re not dangerous. They are really trying, by and large, to follow the ever-changing rules. This is totally, 100% unnecessary and 100% designed to hurt kids.” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

House Dems rally against ICE funding just one year after dozens broke ranks on immigration

House Democrats voted overwhelmingly Thursday to block additional funding for ICE, a remarkable shift from when dozens of them voted to expand the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement authority just one year ago — and a sign of how quickly the political ground has moved since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Just seven Democrats voted for the Homeland Security spending bill that included billions for Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine, Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi of New York, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Don Davis of North Carolina. All represent tough terrain — Trump carried all of their districts but Gillen’s, which he lost by just over one point. 00:01 02:00 Read More Other Democrats, incensed by an ICE agent’s shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, voted against the bill — including many who voted exactly one year ago to pass the Laken Riley Act that allows for the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of certain crimes. One of them, Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), a top GOP target in the midterms from a district Trump narrowly carried in 2024, argued this vote was different. “What we have seen time and again is ICE has blatantly violated our Constitution and our law, whether you’re talking about the shooting of a young mother to sending a five year old thousands of miles away to entice his father to turn himself in — this type of shit is not American,” Lee said in an interview Thursday. “ICE has plenty of money … I can’t in good conscience give them any more money until we get some type of guardrails.” Even the Democrats who voted for the funding were sharply critical of ICE. “I hate what ICE is doing in my district and across the country. It’s atrocious. It’s appalling. We should find ways to defund those operations in a surgical way,” Gonzalez said in a brief interview, adding that he supported the bill because it also included funding for Coast Guard and FEMA operations. “But voting no, just to make a statement, could have its own repercussions.” The House passed the DHS funding bill 220 to 207. Democrats’ near-united stand against the bill comes amid building opposition to Trump’s mass deportation campaign. A 49 percent plurality of voters in a new POLITICO poll conducted Jan. 16 to 19 said the effort — including Trump’s widespread deployment of ICE agents across the U.S. — is too aggressive. “The shift is dramatic. And I think the reason for the shift is: Last year the debate in the country was about getting control of the borders and out-of-control immigration. Now the entire situation is about ICE itself and its behavior,” Mark Longabaugh, a veteran Democratic strategist, said of the party’s recalibration on immigration. Amid the growing public furor over ICE’s hardline tactics, congressional Democrats had demanded that any new Homeland Security funding come with more guardrails. The bill most of them voted against Thursday funds ICE at $10 billion through the rest of the fiscal year that ends in September, while cutting funding for removal and enforcement operations by $115 million and Border Patrol funding by $1.8 billion. It also included some Democratic demands: decreasing the number of detention beds by 5,500, providing $20 million each for body cameras for agents and independent oversight of DHS detention facilities, and directing the department to give officers more training on diffusing conflict while interacting with the public. It does not include other items Democrats pushed for, however, such as banning agents from wearing masks during operations, requiring judicial warrants, preventing DHS from detaining and deporting U.S. citizens and blocking the department from using other agencies’ personnel for immigration enforcement. The Democrats who voted in favor of the funding bill argued it was preferable to the alternative — giving Trump what Cuellar described as a “blank check” to carry out his hardline immigration agenda “virtually unchecked.” And some expressed concerns about ramifications for their districts if other agencies who receive their funding through DHS were cut off. Davis warned of the potential consequences of lapsed FEMA and Coast Guard funding in his home state of North Carolina that has been battered by storms and floods in recent years. “Obviously we should have the honest conversations about warrants. We should have the honest conversations about taking off the masks,” Davis said Thursday. But “if we can’t consistently predict when disasters are coming our way, then we’re leaving populations of people vulnerable.” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

‘Is Bond Now Being Granted?’: Conflicting Orders Leave Detainees, Attorneys in Limbo

Immigration detainees hoping to be released from jail have been thrust into chaos after the chief judge of immigration courts told judges to disregard a federal order that made it possible to request bond. In recent weeks, judges in New York and New Jersey immigration court had been willing to listen to requests for bond, as a California federal judge required in a class-action order that she issued on Nov. 25. The decision struck down a six-month-old Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy that had dramatically expanded the legal definition of mandatory detention. The door, briefly opened, seemed to shut last week when Chief Judge Teresa Riley of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) issued internal guidance instructing judges to stop relying on the class-action order “forthwith.” The directive from Riley, who became chief of the office that runs the U.S. immigration courts last month, is largely unprecedented, immigration lawyers and experts told Documented, and represents the latest challenge to courts’ independence under the Trump administration. Immigration judges are career Justice Department employees who are by law independent adjudicators. Immigration News, Curated Sign up to get our curation of news, insights on big stories, job announcements, and events happening in immigration. Enter your email here... Sign Up For Free ​​“When you have a supervisor who tells you or suggests not to follow a federal district court judge’s decision, that takes away a judge’s independence,” said Jeremiah Johnson, vice president of the National Association of Immigration judges. The Trump administration has fired many immigration judges since taking office in January and also pushed out all Biden administration appointees from making decisions at the Board of Immigration Appeals. Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that the government appears to be in “open defiance” of judicial orders. “I’ve never heard of the Department of Justice immigration court leadership issuing an instruction to judges essentially to disregard a federal court order, which is essentially what this EOIR email does,” Chen said. EOIR spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly declined to respond to questions, saying the agency doesn’t comment on litigation. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests for comment. Conflicting Orders Riley’s memo scrambled an already confused situation: In Manhattan’s Varick Street court, the two judges who handle the bulk of the detainee immigration cases in New York City began to give opposite rulings. One judge, Charles Conroy, had granted bond hearings in previous weeks in response to the class-action order. But on Jan. 14, after Riley’s directive circulated, he said he could no longer permit the contested bond hearings. Conroy declined to comment. The other judge, Dara Reid, presiding over the detainee calendar the following day, said she had to grant a bond hearing because of the federal class-action order. “I don’t see any way around it,” Reid said, adding, “I’m bound by it.” When the ICE lawyer restated the government’s position, Reid disagreed and said, “maybe we’ll have a real answer” soon. The attorney, appearing in the courtroom by video from ICE’s office in the same building, bowed his head in laughter and covered his face. “I laughed because I didn’t want to cry,” he said. Federal Judge Sunshine Sykes, who had issued the class-action order requiring bond hearings, delayed a previously scheduled hearing last Friday until Jan. 22 to give the government’s lawyers time to respond to reports about the chief judge’s directive. Even before the chief judge’s order, most immigration judges across the country had been accepting ICE’s push to mandate detention for many more noncitizens until their deportation cases are resolved, according to Niels Frenzen, a law professor at the University of Southern California and one of the attorneys in the class-action case. Legal advocates filed the case in July, aiming to strike down a policy ICE adopted in a July 8 memo that redefined who was “seeking admission” and therefore ineligible for release on bond. The term should apply not only to people arriving unlawfully at or near the border—the practice for nearly three decades—but also to those who entered the country “without inspection” long ago, the agency said. That legal stance has helped ICE to fill its lockups. Faced with indefinite incarceration under poor conditions, many detainees have given up their legal right to contest deportation and asked to leave the country voluntarily. Federal judges have ruled in hundreds of individual cases that the policy was an unconstitutional denial of due process. The case before Sykes, in the U.S. District Court in Riverside, California, was filed on behalf of four people detained in ICE’s intensive and controversial raids in Los Angeles in June. The case garnered national attention when the judge certified it as a national class action on Nov. 25 in what appeared to be a transformative decision in favor of detainees. Since then, the Justice Department has tried various gambits to dodge the order and has also filed an appeal to the 9th U.S.Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Sykes’s order remains in effect. Seeking Bond Most immigration judges in New York and New Jersey (where many New Yorkers’ cases are heard after they’re detained in the Garden State or Pennsylvania) lined up behind Judge Sykes’s Maldonado Bautista v. Noem ruling, according to interviews with local attorneys and courtroom observations. Still, the bond hearings very often end up with judges refusing to allow release. In immigration court, the burden is on detainees (rather than prosecutors, as in criminal courts) to prove they are not a flight risk or danger to the community. And it’s not so easy to prove a negative. Dulce, a 51-year-old woman born in the Puebla state of Mexico, was able to request bond thanks to the Bautista decision. On Jan. 6, she was led through the corridors of the Elizabeth Contract Detention Center to a low-ceilinged courtroom on the ground floor. Immigration Judge Arya Ranasinghe was presiding, albeit via video from her courtroom in Newark, five miles away. The judge quickly bypassed Department of Homeland Security attorney Sarah Campbell’s argument that she lacked jurisdiction to consider bond. Then Campbell sought to use a minor offense to make the case that Dulce wouldn’t return to court if released. Dulce, whose full name is being withheld by Documented, has lived in the United States since 1993 and doesn’t have a criminal record. But under the DHS lawyer’s questioning, she acknowledged getting a traffic ticket for driving with an expired license 14 years ago. Campbell demanded to know why it didn’t show up in her search of a database of New Jersey municipal court records, and implied Dulce gave a false name to police. Dulce said she didn’t know. Her attorney, Maggie Dunsmuir, quickly located the record under her name in the same database. Judge Ranasinghe set a $10,000 bond, noting that Dulce has a 9-year-old child to care for and that she had lost her husband, a U.S. citizen, to ALS in October. He was 46. Weeping and weary looking beneath a cascade of dark, wavy hair, Dulce followed a guard back to the cells in her blue scrubs to wait for her bond to be processed. She was released three days later, having been detained since Dec. 23, through the Christmas season. She was home in time for her daughter’s 10th birthday. A Challenge to Mandatory Detention The sticking point in the legal battle over this policy is a Sept. 5 decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals, the Justice Department unit that interprets immigration laws. In the decision, known as Matter of Yajure Hurtado, the board provided a legal basis for the detention policy ICE had adopted two months before. It found that a “plain reading” of a 1996 immigration law contradicted the longtime interpretation of who was “seeking admission.” The board’s published decisions are binding on immigration judges. Blocked from seeking bond for their clients in immigration court, many lawyers have gone to federal district courts to file habeas corpus lawsuits, the legal mechanism used to challenge unconstitutional detention. Federal judges have found time and again in these habeas cases that the ICE policy and the immigration board’s “plain reading” of the law were plainly wrong. In a Nov. 26 ruling, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan cited 350 decisions that rejected the Trump administration’s novel position on mandatory detention (of the 362 total decisions about the administration’s policy). The rulings came from 160 judges in 50 courts. “Thus, the overwhelming, lopsided majority have held that the law still means what it always has meant,” Judge Kaplan wrote in ordering release of Sergio Barco Mercado, a carpenter from Peru. Barco had been granted bond in 2022 but ICE re-arrested him as he left a courtroom at 26 Federal Plaza in New York on Aug. 8. He was detained under what the court ruled elsewhere were deplorable conditions. The government’s argument “does not and has never had a reasonable basis in statutory text, structure, or history,” Kaplan wrote. “Their position has been rejected with near unanimity in the overwhelming majority of cases across the country.” In his order, he required the government to pay Barco’s legal fees. More such rulings have followed. In a Jan. 2 decision, Judge Clay Land of U.S. District Court in Columbus, Georgia, ordered bond hearings for the plaintiffs in 44 separate habeas cases with a single two-page ruling. He wrote: “The brevity of this order is appropriate given that the issue presented is exactly the same as the issue previously decided on numerous occasions by the Court and yet Respondents [the government agencies] insist upon denying the relief that the Court has found is required.” But all of these rulings were for individual cases. Judge Sykes’s Nov. 25 decision to grant class-action status to her previous ruling in the Maldonado Bautista case changed that. Immigrant advocates rejoiced. But ICE lawyers went on to tell immigration judges for more than three weeks that the ruling didn’t apply because Judge Sykes had not entered a final judgment in the case. In the Elizabeth court, Immigration Judge Tamar Wilson rejected several bond requests on Dec. 18 because in her view, the Hurtado case remained in effect. In one instance, she told the lawyer for a Guatemalan man, Jose Madrid-Vargas, that if she did have jurisdiction, she would grant release on $7,500 bond. Later that same day in California, Judge Sykes filed the final judgment in the class-action case; it “vacates” the policy described in the July 8 ICE memo across the country. She also made clear she’d invalidated the Hurtado ruling. She said she didn’t specifically vacate the Hurtado decision because it came after the lawsuit before her was filed. But, she wrote, the Hurtado interpretation contradicted her order and therefore “is no longer controlling.” DHS attorneys sought to sidestep Sykes’s Dec.18 order by telling judges in immigration courts in Newark, Elizabeth and New York that the ruling had not formally vacated the Hurtado decision. This was true, but misleading: Sykes’s clarifying order on Dec. 18 stated that Hurtado should no longer be relied on. In a Jan. 9 report to the court, the plaintiffs in the class action case said that “remarkably,” judges are taking different positions even within the same immigration court. Further Confusion This back and forth between ICE’s attorneys and immigration judges, on whether to conform to Hurtado or Bautista, has left an uncertain terrain for any immigration detainee who hopes to be released on bond. “Is bond now being granted?” the lawyer for a Senegalese detainee asked Newark Immigration Judge Michael Neal on Dec. 29. “Are you referring to Bautista?” the judge responded. “Yes.” “There have been developments on that case” was all the judge would say. It’s the question of the hour for detainees and their lawyers. “What’s your position with the Maldonado [Bautista] bond hearings?” attorney Sebastian Estrada asked on Jan. 7 on behalf of a Mexican client held in an Orange County, New York, jail. “Are you hearing them?” “Yes, I am,” Conroy, the New York immigration judge, answered. Nonetheless, the DHS attorney on duty in Judge Conroy’s court continued to present the Trump administration’s argument in each bond hearing. “I don’t agree with that, based on Bautista,” Conroy replied. That didn’t help an Indian immigrant who appeared before him. The judge found that he failed to prove he wasn’t a danger to the community, based on a conviction for aggravated driving under the influence. Across the hall on Jan. 8, Immigration Judge Thomas Mungoven was filling in on detainee docket duty for the week. He tried to avoid declaring where he stood between the rock and the hard place of the two legal decisions. DHS once again argued that the Hurtado case barred a hearing, this time for a Staten Island man from Mexico, whose supporting documents included a letter from Bishop Peter Byrne of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. ALSO READ How New Yorkers Are Stepping Up to Protect Immigrant Neighbors BY Eileen Grench Jan 23, 2026 The judge refused bond, based on the man’s 2014 conviction for assault and two more recent criminal cases that were dismissed. “I’m not addressing the Hurtado-Bautista issue,” he emphasized. But in a sense, he was. Just by hearing the request, the judge had taken a position. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

Thousands protest against Trump immigration policies

Jan 20 (Reuters) - Thousands of U.S. workers and students marched through cities and university campuses on Tuesday in opposition to the immigration policies of President Donald Trump. On the first anniversary of Trump's second term, protests sprang up across the country against his aggressive immigration crackdown that prompted outrage after federal agents dragged a U.S. citizen from her car and shot dead 37-year-old mother Renee Good in Minneapolis in past weeks. The Reuters Inside Track newsletter is your essential guide to the biggest events in global sport. Sign up here. Advertisement · Scroll to continue Hundreds of protesters gathered in Washington and smaller cities like Asheville, North Carolina, where demonstrators marched through the downtown shouting "No ICE, no KKK, no fascist USA," according to online videos. Item 1 of 4 People hold signs and a U.S. flag during a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's policies on the one-year mark into his second term in office in Los Angeles, California, U.S., January 20, 2026. REUTERS/Arafat Barbakh [1/4]People hold signs and a U.S. flag during a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's policies on the one-year mark into his second term in office in Los Angeles, California, U.S., January 20, 2026. REUTERS/Arafat Barbakh Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab The Trump administration says it has a mandate from voters to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally. Recent polls show most Americans disapprove of the use of force by officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. University students demonstrated in Cleveland, Ohio, chanting "No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here" while high schoolers in Santa Fe, New Mexico, left class to attend a "Stop ICE Terror" rally at the state capitol, according to protest organizers and school officials. Advertisement · Scroll to continue The actions were organized by left-leaning groups such as Indivisible and 50501, as well as labor unions and grassroots organizations opposed to immigrant detention camps, like one in El Paso, Texas, where three detainees have died in the last six weeks, according to federal authorities. The demonstrations were set to roll west to cities such as San Francisco and Seattle, where afternoon and evening protests were planned. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.

Trump's ICE force is sweeping America. Billions in his tax and spending cuts bill are paying for it

WASHINGTON (AP) — A ballooning Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget. Hiring bonuses of $50,000. Swelling ranks of ICE officers, to 22,000, in an expanding national force bigger than most police departments in America. President Donald Trump promised the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, but achieving his goal wouldn't have been possible without funding from the big tax and spending cuts bill passed by Republicans in Congress, and it's fueling unprecedented immigration enforcement actions in cities like Minneapolis and beyond. The GOP's big bill is "supercharging ICE," one budget expert said, in ways that Americans may not fully realize — and that have only just begun. "I just don't think people have a sense of the scale," said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress and a former adviser to the Biden administration's Office of Management and Budget. "We're looking at ICE in a way we've never seen before," he said. Trump's big bill creates massive law enforcement force As the Republican president marks the first year of his second term, the immigration enforcement and removal operation that has been a cornerstone of his domestic and foreign policy agenda is rapidly transforming into something else — a national law enforcement presence with billions upon billions of dollars in new spending from U.S. taxpayers. The shooting death of Renee Good in Minneapolis showed the alarming reach of the new federalized force, sparking unrelenting protests against the military-styled officers seen going door to door to find and detain immigrants. Amid the outpouring of opposition, Trump revived threats to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell the demonstrations and the U.S. Army has 1,500 soldiers ready to deploy. But Trump's own public approval rating on immigration, one of his signature issues, has slipped since he took office, according to an AP-NORC poll. "Public sentiment is everything," said Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez, D-N.Y., at a press conference at the Capitol with lawmakers supporting legislation to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Americans, she said, are upset at what they are seeing. "They didn't sign on for this," she said. Border crossings down, but Americans confront new ICE enforcements To be sure, illegal crossings into the U.S. at the Mexico border have fallen to historic lows under Trump, a remarkable shift from just a few years ago when President Joe Biden's Democratic administration allowed millions of people to temporarily enter the U.S. as they adjudicated their claims to stay. Yet as enforcement moves away from the border, the newly hired army of immigration officers swarming city streets with aggressive tactics — in Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere — is something not normally seen in the U.S. Armed and masked law enforcement officers are being witnessed smashing car windows, yanking people from vehicles and chasing and wrestling others to the ground and hauling them away — images playing out in endless loops on TVs and other screens. And it's not just ICE. A long list of supporting agencies, including federal, state and local police and sheriff's offices, are entering into contract partnerships with Homeland Security to conduct immigration enforcement operations in communities around the nation. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has warned Democrats that this is "no time to be playing games" by stirring up the opposition to immigration enforcement officers in Minneapolis and other places. WATCH: Minnesota protests enter 3rd week as immigration raids continue "They need to get out of the way and allow federal law enforcement to do its duty," Johnson said at the Capitol. Noem has said the immigration enforcement officers are acting lawfully. The department insists it's targeting criminals in the actions, what officials call the worst of the worst immigrants. However, reports show that non-criminals and U.S. citizens are also being forcibly detained by immigration officers. The Supreme Court last year lifted a ban on using race alone in the immigration stops. Trump last month called Somali immigrants "garbage," comments that echoed his past objections to immigrants from certain countries. The Trump administration has set a goal of 100,000 detentions a day, about three times what's typical, with 1 million deportations a year. Money from the big bill flows with few restraints With Republican control of Congress, the impeachment of Noem or any other Trump official is not a viable political option for Democrats, who would not appear to have the vote tally even among their own ranks. In fact, even if Congress wanted to curtail Trump's immigration operations — by threatening to shut down the government, for example — it would be difficult to stop the spend. What Trump called the "big, beautiful bill" is essentially on autopilot through 2029, the year he's scheduled to finish his term and leave office. The legislation essentially doubled annual Homeland Security funding, adding $170 billion to be used over four years. Of that, ICE, which typically receives about $10 billion a year, was provided $30 billion for operations and $45 billion for detention facilities. "The first thing that comes to mind is spending on this level is typically done on the military," said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. "Trump is militarizing immigration enforcement." Ahead, Congress will consider a routine annual funding package for Homeland Security unveiled Tuesday, or risk a partial shutdown Jan. 30. A growing group of Democratic senators and the Congressional Progressive Caucus have had enough. They say they won't support additional funds without significant changes. Lawmakers are considering various restrictions on ICE operations, including limiting arrests around hospitals, courthouses, churches and other sensitive locations and ensuring that officers display proper identification and refrain from wearing face masks. "I think ICE needs to be totally torn down," said Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., on CNN over the weekend. "People want immigration enforcement that goes after criminals," he said. And not what he called this "goon squad." Big spending underway, but Trump falls short of goals Meanwhile, Homeland Security has begun tapping the new money at its disposal. The department informed Congress it has obligated roughly $58 billion — most of that, some $37 billion, for border wall construction, according to a person familiar with the private assessment but unauthorized to discuss it. The Department of Homeland Security said its massive recruitment campaign blew past its 10,000-person target to bring in 12,000 new hires, more than doubling the force to 22,000 officers, in a matter of months. "The good news is that thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill that President Trump signed, we have an additional 12,000 ICE officers and agents on the ground across the country," Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a December statement. The department also announced it had arrested and deported about 600,000 people. It also said 1.9 million other people had "voluntarily self-deported" since January 2025, when Trump took office. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.