Since July 2025, the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive expansion of immigration detention, declaring that virtually anyone in the country unlawfully is subject to mandatory detention without bond, even if they’ve lived in the U.S. for decades and have no criminal record. The policy reversed 30 years of bipartisan practice, under which federal immigration authorities prioritized detention only for individuals deemed dangerous or likely to flee.

The legal backlash has been extraordinary. More than 360 federal judges, including over 40 appointed by Trump himself, along with appointees of every president since Ronald Reagan, have rejected the administration’s expanded detention strategy in over 3,000 cases. Just 27 judges, 19 of them Trump appointees, have sided with the administration across roughly 130 cases.

Courts have documented disturbing patterns: people arrested at routine ICE check-ins they’d attended for years, families torn apart without warning, detainees shipped to remote facilities for reasons government lawyers themselves couldn’t explain. One judge described the case of a 52-year-old woman from Guinea, grabbed from an airport security line without notice and shipped to Louisiana in shackles, despite the fact that an immigration judge had previously found she’d face persecution if returned to her home country. Another ordered the release of a Vietnamese woman detained at a check-in even though the government had failed to obtain travel documents for her return for 26 years; her son died by suicide during her detention.

“No one disputes that the government may, consistent with the law’s requirements, pursue the removal of people who are in this country unlawfully. But the way we treat others matters,” wrote U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian.

The legal question centers on a decades-old immigration statute requiring detention of “applicants for admission” who are “seeking admission” to the U.S. Historically, this applied to recent border crossers. People living in the country’s interior fell under a different provision allowing bond hearings. ICE Director Todd Lyons upended that framework in July by declaring everyone targeted for deportation an “applicant for admission,” a position later backed by the Board of Immigration Appeals in October.

Despite the overwhelming consensus against the policy at the district court level, no nationwide injunction has taken hold, partly because most challenges are filed on an emergency, individual basis, making broad class actions difficult to assemble.

Then, on February 6, 2026, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals handed the administration its most significant legal victory. In a 2-1 decision, the panel ruled that the administration’s interpretation is correct. Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee joined by Trump appointee Judge Kyle Duncan, wrote that prior administrations simply chose not to exercise their full detention authority, not that they lacked it.

In dissent, Judge Dana Douglas warned that the majority’s reasoning would authorize the detention of up to 2 million immigrants without bond, including spouses and parents of American citizens. “The government’s proposed reading of the statute would mean that, for purposes of immigration detention, the border is now everywhere,” she wrote. “That is not the law Congress passed.”

The 5th Circuit ruling contradicts the position of the vast majority of federal judges and conflicts with signals from the 7th Circuit, which indicated opposition to the administration’s approach. Challenges remain pending in nearly every appellate circuit, making Supreme Court review increasingly likely.

Immigrant advocates have argued that the administration’s win-loss record is beside the point, arguing that the real goal is to make the legal process so burdensome that many give up rather than fight detention. As one judge put it, comparing the administration’s litigation posture to Sisyphus rolling a rock uphill, the losses keep piling up. But with the 5th Circuit now providing cover, the administration has signaled it will keep pushing until the Supreme Court weighs in.