Trump Forced To Release 65,000 ICE Detainees. Here’s Why.

Judges across the country have ordered the release of 65,000 detainees from federal immigration custody, revealing the extent of a massive operation to undermine the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

White House border czar Tom Homan told Fox News over the weekend that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees are filing “a record number of habeas cases” to get released and that “radical judges” are largely granting their petitions.

“The number’s around 65,000 people that we arrested that we had to release because of habeas cases out of radical judges. So there’s a lot we’re fighting against, more than any other president,” Homan said.

The surge in habeas petitions comes after the Department of Homeland Security issued a sweeping policy to deny bond hearings to ICE detainees. The policy has led to a slew of legal challenges, leading to conflicting rulings by circuit courts across the country.

When illegal immigrants file habeas petitions to challenge their detention, their cases are moved from the immigration courts to federal district courts, where judges tend to look at their arguments more favorably, experts told The Daily Wire. If they get released, it can buy them years of additional time in the United States, allowing them to apply for immigration status.

“Partisan activist federal district judges are systematically undoing the expensive, time-consuming work of ICE and releasing thousands of arrestable illegal aliens from lawful detention,” Todd Bensman, who recently left his role as senior adviser to the ICE Office of the Director, told The Daily Wire.

“It’s a racket, a scam, and a public safety hazard. Federal district judges have zero jurisdiction over administrative immigration processes. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for the Supreme Court to shut down this scam. I can’t say how many of these releases have perpetrated crimes but my fingers are crossed that the Supreme Court moves quickly,” Bensman said.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona Timothy Courchaine previously told The Daily Wire that federal judges are granting bond in “most” such cases, adding that “we’ve been losing almost all of these.”

Dan Gividen, a Dallas-based immigration attorney, has shifted his practice from arguing cases before immigration judges to filing habeas petitions in district courts, where he’s had better success getting his clients released. His office went from filing roughly “three or four” habeas petitions on behalf of migrant clients in 2019 to roughly 150 in the last year, 70 of which have been granted, he said.

“That’s unheard of previously,” Gividen said of his success.

“It’s good to see the way that it’s going,” he said. “The impact is huge.”

U.S. attorneys’ offices have become bogged down by the overwhelming caseload, which has forced them to divert criminal prosecutors to handle habeas immigration cases.

“We’ve had to pull criminal prosecutors off of their caseloads and put them into civil [cases],” Courchaine previously said.

“We’ve had to shift around criminal prosecutors’ workloads and investigations so they could take this on. Even my criminal chief, who’s in charge of more than 60 federal prosecutors up in Phoenix, Arizona, has had to volunteer to take cases,” he added.