Ordered free, still locked up: Judges fume over ICE detentions

Judge Troy Nunley was fed up.

Federal immigration officials had once again flouted their authority by keeping a man locked in a detention center in California City after ordering Nunley’s release. When he was finally released, the man was thrown onto the street without his passport, driver’s license or other personal belongings. The judge’s request for the items to be returned was met with silence.

And on Tuesday, Nunley, chief judge of the Eastern District of California, slapped Justice Department attorney Jonathan Yu with a civil sanction and a $250 fine.

Nunley harshly explained why he had to take such a rare step. The fine may be less than some traffic tickets, but it’s almost unheard of for a judge to formally admonish a government attorney.

By Yu’s own admission, he was drowning in his work. In his order, Nunley said the attorney described being handed more than 300 nearly identical cases in the past three months, all of them involving detained immigrants who claimed they were detained without cause.

Court records show that many cases in California involve longtime U.S. residents being unexpectedly jailed following routine checks with immigration officials. One was an Afghan who helped America’s war effort. Another is a Cambodian grandmother of eight who escaped Pol Pot’s killing fields as a girl nearly 50 years ago.

Until last year, most were fighting deportation on bond after a brief hearing with an immigration judge. Now, their only hope for release is to file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, a legal maneuver once typically used for death row inmates and suspected terrorists, filling the nation’s busiest federal courts with thousands of emergency cases.

The Trump administration lawyer said he tried to “prioritize” the situation, but Nunley found himself repeatedly failing to comply and leaving people behind bars who had the right to walk free.

“The court is not convinced,” he wrote in announcing the sanctions.

The decision came days after Nunley took the unusual step of declaring a “judicial emergency” in the region that covers nearly half of California, stretching from the Oregon border to the Mojave Desert in the state’s interior (including Fresno, Bakersfield and Sacramento).

Last year, the Eastern District received more petitions from immigration detainees than almost any other jurisdiction in the United States: more than 2,700 since January; fewer than 500 last year and only 18 in 2024. Similar crises are occurring elsewhere; Federal courts in Minnesota were briefly paralyzed by the Trump administration’s enforcement blitz there last winter.

In an interview with The Times, Nunley said coping with the increased activity since last summer was “like being hit over the head with a stick.”

“We’re up all night looking at these cases,” he said.

So far this year, the Eastern District’s six active judges have ordered the release of almost 2,000 people.

“The majority of the cases we see are cases where people should not be detained,” Nunley said. “There should be hearings to decide whether they will remain in this country, and until those hearings are held, they should be free.”

Since last July, the Department of Homeland Security has directed that all immigrants it arrests be subject to “mandatory detention”; this was a policy that previously applied only to those apprehended at the border.

The change comes four days after President Trump signed the spending bill allocating $45 billion to expand the federal immigrant incarceration network.

“This has been a major shift in the way the government reads the law,” said My Khanh Ngo, senior attorney with the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project. “Almost every judge who has looked at this agrees that these people should be released on bail, but thousands remain in custody.”

Elizabeth Vega, 15, and Darlene Rumualdo, 15, of Torres High School, join labor organizers, clergy and immigrant rights groups to protest nationwide immigration raids at La Placita Olvera in downtown Los Angeles on Jan. 23, 2026.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Long-term U.S. residents who might once have fought removal from their homes where they could more easily gather evidence and meet with lawyers to support their cases are instead being detained indefinitely.

Many of them have no criminal record. Some have been in the United States so long that the countries they came from no longer exist.

“People are locked up in the same facilities as people accused of crimes, people convicted of crimes… and then you tell people you don’t have a chance of getting out,” Ngo said. “Detaining people and not giving them a chance to leave custody is a way of forcing people to give up their rights.”

The habeas process can take weeks or months, depending on the judge and the district.

“When immigration cases hit our area, we were hit harder than anyone outside of West Texas,” Nunley said. “We had more cases than anyone else in the beginning.”

Today, data compiled by ProPublica and legal activist groups Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative It shows that nearly a quarter of the nearly 30,000 active habeas petitions in the United States are in California courts. Nunley’s own charts show that half of California’s cases are in his district; here, increased enforcement, a large immigrant worker population, and concentration of detention centers have created a sudden flood of habeas petitions.

The cases are based on the Constitution’s guarantee of fair trials before deprivation of life, liberty, or property. But in some cases, the government has argued that “the Fifth Amendment does not apply” to detained immigrants, according to court records.

Justice Department lawyers who responded to freedom bids now regularly complain that they are overwhelmed by paperwork.

Judges, accustomed to ensuring that government lawyers comply with their orders, were outraged.

Judge Sunshine Sykes in the Central District of California, which covers Los Angeles and surrounding counties, wrote an impassioned decision earlier this year saying the Trump administration was engaging in “terrorism against non-citizens.”

Sykes is one of several federal judges across the country trying to force the government to restart bond hearings. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that ruling in March, leaving the habeas system in place for now. But due to challenges or recent decisions in multiple circuits, experts say the fight is doomed for the Supreme Court.

“ICE has the law and the facts on its side and abides by all court orders until ultimately decided by the highest court in the land,” a Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email to The Times.

A woman holding a sign saying “ICE is not welcome here!” He signed at a vigil in San Pedro in January.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Lawyers fighting to free those imprisoned under the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy say they were initially ill-equipped for these legal battles because they used to be extremely rare.

According to Jean Reisz, co-director of the USC Immigration Clinic, most federal judges had only seen a handful of habeas petitions before last summer; Then suddenly hundreds of urgent requests for help arrived.

Reisz said there are efforts to train public interest legal groups on how to effectively argue habeas cases, “but it’s taking some time to get up to speed.”

A federal agent asks residents to stand down after a shooting during an immigration enforcement operation in Willowbrook on Jan. 21, 2026.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

At the same time, lawyers are pushing judges overseeing cases to act quickly because endless procedural delays keep people in jail, Reisz said.

“Most habeas petitions involve a motion for temporary restraining orders, which require emergency orders from the courts that require the courts to act very quickly,” Reisz said.

California’s federal district courts continue to have a backlog thousands deep. Nunley said the system is having trouble keeping up with the volume of cases.

“There’s nothing that says non-citizens shouldn’t have the right to due process,” Nunley said. “These are our people, they live in our district. They are entitled to the same due process that you and I are entitled to.”