The Dept of Homeland Securityhas been losing most court cases during the Trump 2 administration.

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.

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.

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 later 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.