Explore the data: 10,000 rulings against Trump in ICE cases

Politico: “Under President Donald Trump, ICE is locking up immigrants at an unprecedented scale, holding tens of thousands of people — many with no criminal records and deep roots in the U.S. — in detention facilities to await the outcome of deportation proceedings. POLITICO is tracking the surge in litigation triggered by the administration’s novel policy that began in July, and releasing our database, below, of the 11,000-plus cases in which federal district courts reached a ruling on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention practices. More than 10,000 of those were rulings against the administration, handed down by judges appointed by president. POLITICO compiled this database by canvassing public court records for cases in which detainees sued Department of Homeland Security leaders — Markwayne Mullin or his predecessor, Kristi Noem — or Trump. We also identified other defendants, often including local ICE supervisors or wardens of detention facilities. While we have made every effort to be comprehensive, there is no uniform system for identifying every detention-related case, and there may be a small number of rulings we didn’t find. Our journalists manually compiled, analyzed and categorized these records. Using a large language model, POLITICO extracted the case name, judge, date and district from each opinion. AI was not used in assessing the outcome or reasoning of each case. Most of these rulings pertain to the Trump administration’s unprecedented legal argument that it can detain anyone present in the country who is eligible for deportation, without a chance for a hearing. Our analysis also includes: rulings that hinged on other due process violations, such as alleged violations of ICE’s internal regulations; prolonged detentions or extreme medical need (which we have classified as “due process”); rulings based on a Supreme Court case allowing people to seek release if they’re unlikely to actually be deported (“Zadvydas detention”); and some for which judges’ reasoning was unclear….”