Working Immigrants

Politico reports that “1 year in, ICE’s mass detention policy is on the ropes.” Kyle Cheney writes that “Federal judges have spent a full year overwhelmingly rejecting ICE’s effort to lock up people the Trump administration is seeking to deport — finding a combination of illegality, unconstitutionality, incompetence and cruelty at a shocking scale. More than 15,000 times.

[Excerpts from Politico] The 15,000 rulings against the administration compare to about 2,200 instances in which judges upheld ICE detentions. Those 2,200 rulings have been concentrated in a handful of courts and driven by a small subset of judges.

In a July 8, 2025, memo, the agency said agents would detain, without bond, tens of thousands of people with deep roots in the U.S. and overwhelmingly without criminal records. It’s a group that, until last year, would have at least been afforded bond hearings before facing indefinite detention.

The Trump administration has now been shot down by at least 464 federal judges, with just 54 — overwhelmingly appointed by Trump — ruling in the administration’s favor.

At the heart is ICE’s novel reading of 30-year-old immigration laws that every prior administration understood to apply only to people who had recently crossed the border illegally.

But since that July 8, 2025, ICE memo, the administration has argued that this “mandatory detention” applies to virtually anyone who entered the country without permission, no matter how long they’ve resided in the U.S., whether they’ve established roots in their communities, have spouses or children who are U.S. citizens, or have flawless attendance records at ICE check-ins or immigration court proceedings.

What has unfolded since has been one of the most extraordinary legal rebukes in modern history. For a year, those detained under the new policy have flooded federal courts in every corner of the country with tens of thousands of emergency petitions seeking release or bond hearings. And judges have responded by ordering their release or, at minimum, a bond hearing aimed at forcing the government to justify their continued detention.

A year in, appeals courts have now started ruling on ICE’s mandatory detention policy. And while the first two to decide — the Louisiana-based 5th Circuit and the Missouri-based 8th Circuit — sided with the administration, the story since then has been a continuation of the rout against ICE.[For a February 6, 2026 decision supporting the administration, go here.]

Appeals courts based in New York, Georgia, Ohio and Colorado have since rejected ICE’s `enormous parts of the country — including Florida, where a disproportionate share of ICE detainees are located — to reject the administration’s approach.

Rulings in the remaining five federal appeals courts are imminent.

Perhaps most significantly, a panel of judges in the 5th Circuit — which covers Texas, the busiest state for ICE detention cases — issued a ruling [July 2, Sosnava Rodriguez v. Ortega, go here] that dramatically undercut ICE’s year-old mandatory detention policy. The 2-1 decision concluded that ICE detainees held under the policy must be afforded a bond hearing within 90 days or immediately released.

[The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday vacated this decision. A panel of three judges from the conservative court, which covers Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, had held July 2 that unjustified detention for an indefinite period would violate the Constitution. ICE and Department of Homeland Security officials had appealed that judgment, petitioning the full appeals court to rehear the case. The court will consider the case in September.] (Go here.)

The Trump administration has effectively closed down or severely restricted most non-white immigration from the Middle East, Africa and Asia into the U.S. while keeping upon immigration from white Commonwealth and EU countries, and white persons from South Africa. President Trump said on April 26,2026, “The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.”

Here is a truncated time line of an early time of such a restriction – through 1924.

1882 — Chinese Exclusion. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers. It was the first major federal immigration law to exclude a named ethnic laboring population.

1883 — Francis Galton coined “eugenics.”  Some “races or strains” were naturally more suitable than others and should be helped to prevail.

1890–1896 — Racial separation approved by Supreme Court. In Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that legally compelled “separate but equal” facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

1894 — The Immigration Restriction League founded. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge as leading political ally.

1899 — European racial types William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe organized Europeans into physical and geographical types, especially the northern or Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean groups.

1910–1911 — Congress approve official dictionary of races. The Dillingham Commission produced a Dictionary of Races or Peoples. The categories gave legislators a federal body of supposedly objective racial data on which later restrictions could be built.

1916 — Madison Grant ranks European races– In The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant presented the Nordic race as the principal creator of American and European civilization and warned that immigration and racial mixture were causing its decline. The Eugenics Record Office reported that southern and eastern European immigrants carried hereditary criminality, mental illness, and “feeblemindedness.”

1917 —Asian barrier becomes law. The Immigration Act of 1917 created the Asiatic Barred Zone, excluding immigration from much of Asia and the Pacific.

The act combined three ways of ranking people: educational capacity, supposed individual defect, and geographical-racial origin.

1921 — Racial preference systematic preference in law The Emergency Quota Act limited annual immigration from each European nationality to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born residents from that country recorded in the 1910 census.

1922 — The Supreme Court rules that Japanese people are not white In Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court held that “white person” essentially meant a member of the Caucasian race and that Japanese people were not Caucasian.

1924 — The Immigration Act of 1924 The Johnson-Reed Act reduced each European nationality’s immediate quota to 2 percent of its population in the 1890 census. The date was deliberately chosen because it preceded the largest immigration from Italy, Russia, Poland, and the rest of southern and eastern Europe. Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia received much larger quotas.

Ryan Schwank is a former ICE attorney who taught the legal curriculum to new deportation officers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. He resigned from ICE on February 13, 2026, and testified publicly on February 23, 2026. Technically, he appeared at a Democratic-led bicameral congressional forum.

Excerpts from his testimony:

When I joined ICE on August 1st, 2021 as an Assistant Chief Counsel. I followed that oath for 4 1/2 years, working side by side with ICE officers, and I followed it when I resigned on February 13th, 2026, a little over a week ago so that I could speak to you today.

Five months ago, I was asked to teach the law to new cadets at the ICE Academy in Glencoe, Georgia, where ICE is training its new, inexperienced recruits….

On my first day at the Academy, I was instructed to read and return a memo in my supervisor’s presence which claimed ICE officers could enter homes without a judicial warrant….Never in my career had I ever received such a blatant unlawful order, nor 1 conveyed in such a troubling manner. Incredibly, I was being shown this memo in secret by my supervisor, who made sure that I understood that this obedience could cost me my job.

For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program, cutting 240 hours from 584 hour program classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention and the limits of officers authority. For example, they ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force…..

Our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well that they can make split second decisions about what they can and cannot do in life or death situations. Yet, in the name of churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tasks that we need to know if cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job…..

No reasonable person would believe a training program suddenly cut nearly in half could meet the minimum legal requirements. These aren’t abstract rules. They’re required in regulations such as HCFR 287G1. Congress requires immigration officers to meet minimum standards for a reason. ICE cannot lawfully perform their duties, make arrests, carry weapons and use force without passing appropriate training.

From the Summary of the 90-page report:

Camp East Montana is the nation’s largest immigration detention center, with the current capacity to hold up to 5,000 people. It is located on the grounds of Fort Bliss, a US military base with headquarters in El Paso, Texas.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU found that people detained at Camp East Montana endured conditions of confinement that amounted to enforced disappearance, cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment, excessive use of force including one extrajudicial killing, life-threatening medical neglect, barriers to legal representation, and coercive third-country removals. Together, these abuses violate fundamental protections under US and international human rights law.

In interview after interview, detained people told Human Rights Watch that they were beaten by guards, denied necessary medical care, and prevented from contacting family members or lawyers. One woman told us guards and nurses denied her emergency medical care, and she is at risk of losing her vision permanently as a result. Another man said guards groped his testicles during beatings and placed him in solitary confinement arbitrarily. Many detainees told us facility guards denied them outdoor recreation for weeks at a time, in extreme cases leaving them without sunlight or any outdoor recreation for over a month…..

The abuses….occurred within the broader context of the US government’s expansion of immigration detention….. Many detained at Camp East Montana were arrested near their place of work or their homes, apprehended during enforcement operations, ICE raids, and traffic stops and other routine encounters with local law enforcement, including at USCIS Field Offices…..

Most of the people we interviewed said they had a valid work permit. When they presented their documents, arresting officers falsely told them that their work authorization did not establish legal presence in the US. Subsequently, most were taken to local jails or holding facilities, often violently, before being transferred by plane to Camp East Montana. Many told us they felt like they were kidnapped.

Detained people said they were held incommunicado after their arrest, unable to contact family members or attorneys. Department of Homeland Security systems, including the online Detainee Locator, often failed to indicate where they were being held and, in some cases, did not reflect that they were in detention at all. Family members searching for loved ones frequently received no meaningful information from DHS. In some of the cases documented by Human Rights Watch, these practices amounted to enforced disappearance under international human rights law…..

In April 2026, an ICE internal investigation identified violations of federal detention standards, including unreported uses of force, medical neglect, failures to conduct required suicide and wellness checks, inadequate sexual abuse prevention measures, unanswered grievances, and systemic failures to process detainee requests for assistance. This report’s findings corroborate many of these same patterns of government abuse.

The Census Bureau issued on August 18 a preliminary study of non-citizen voting. It said that at least 24,000 persons voted in the November 2020 elections who were not American citizens. This initial finding will evaporate once the Bureau begins to acknowledge how extremely small error rates in data systems more than explain this.  And this allegation will go down in flames like state level searches for illegal voting.

The reality Trump is dealing with is that there are more poeple who want to expose themselves in Grand Central Station than non-citizens who vote.

Early on, the second Trump administration began to document what it viewed as a high rate of non-citizen voting.

I have discussed in the past efforts by numerous states to estimate and verify the extent of voting by non-citizens. These efforts tend to start with comparing driver license declarations of citizenship status to voting records. At this step, a small number of cases are found. Then, when a ballot by ballot review is performed, the number of non-citizens voting shrinks to a vanishing small number.  Perhaps, one out of every 10,000 votes. Here is a summary of seven states. Before taking into account error rates, the Census Bureau is estimating one out of 5,300 voters.

The credibility of the Census Bureau’s study rests to a large extent on how it addresses the risks of errors in data bases. In sum, the study does not do that — yet.

The 24,000 figure arises out of comparing federal databases with voting records collected by a private firm, DataClear.  The Bureau says it was able to match its citizenship status data with 128 million DataClear records. This comes to a rate of non-citizen voting to two hundredths of one percent.

What are the error rates embedded in the databases?  The error rates comparing a name on the voting record, say Carlos Hernández, with a similar name on the federal databases?  The error rates in voting roles is almost certainly much higher.  The Bureau’s study did not acknowledge that it studied error rates.

Say several steps in voting are affected by an error rate of, say, one hundredth of one percent – 0.01%.  The person named Carlos Hernandez is confused with another at the polling booth, or in final edited voting files. (Note this exhaustive and exhausting data verification document from Colorado.)An extremely small transcription error by DataClear.  As in the state level search for non-citizen voting, the vast share of initially positive hits are explained by error rates.  In the Texas case, a citizen working in a local election department was initially flagged as having voted illegally.

A tiny share of persons detained by Dept, of Homeland Security are violent criminals.

ABC has examined DHS databases on persons detained or deported. I am skeptical of the accuracy of all official DHS data. But here are some figures from the media network’s analysis.

Of the 438,537 people detained between Jan. 20, 2025, and March 11, 2026, 13,018 had a violent felony conviction in the United States. “Violent felony” was defined as homicide, sexual assault, robbery, or assault.

Consistent with past disputes over data and interpretation of law, DHS said that “Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are criminal illegal aliens”…..”We are continuing to go after the worst of the worst — including gang members, pedophiles, and rapists. Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

Elsewhere in the government’s response was a statement that illegal entry into the U.S. is a crime. That would suggest that 1005 of unauthorized persons in the U.S. who were not visa overstays are criminal. But, as this posting lays out, entering illegally is a misdemeanor and being in the country illegally is a civil violation (go here).

This in no way means that 3% of unauthorized persons have committed a violent crime. The figures are skewed by ICE depending on local jails to find persons to detain.

If one includes both reported and unreported violent crimes, about 2% of the total adult population in the U.S. commit a violent crime every year.  The figures are too gross and summery to draw conclusions about the rate of crime among unauthorized persons. But studies have consistently shown that unauthorized persons are less likely to commit crimes.

For example, using data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, researchers reported in 2021 that unauthorized persons have a lower rate of crime than do authorized persons. “We observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years. Our findings help us understand why the most aggressive immigrant removal programs have not delivered on their crime reduction promises and are unlikely to do so in the future.”