In Overloaded Immigration Courts, Detainees Fight Long Odds

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held at least 60,000 people in its detention centers in every month of 2026, each swept up in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts.

Many have petitioned immigration judges to be released on bond, typically after paying thousands of dollars, while their cases are adjudicated. Most fail.

Bloomberg Law reporters attended 55 bond hearings across six days in February and March to chronicle proceedings before immigration judges in California, Texas, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey.

The detainees, mostly men, ranged from some who had been in the country for just years to others who had spent decades raising families and building lives in the US. The administration has asserted that its primary goal is to find and expel criminals; government lawyers mentioned a past criminal charge or arrest in about one-third of the cases.

The hearings took place in sparsely attended courtrooms, tucked within unmarked office buildings and crowded detention centers. Some detainees or their lawyers, if they had representation, joined remotely by video feed.

They typically lasted 20 minutes or less, without the detail or public record generated for most civil or criminal courtroom proceedings. Still, they offered a window into an uneven system beleaguered by an avalanche of cases and whipsawed by changing legal decisions.

Judges agreed to set bond in 15 of the 55 hearings, a step toward getting released. In other cases, several bluntly said that they believed they lacked the authority to do so. For those who fail to get bond, the choices are stark: remain locked up, potentially waiting months or years for their cases to be heard, or agree to leave the country.

Bloomberg Law reached out to the Executive Office for Immigration Review—the agency within the Justice Department that oversees the immigration court system—with questions and an interview request to discuss the process and the hearings its reporters observed. In an emailed response, a spokesperson said the office “does not comment on immigration judge decision-making, nor on litigation-related matters.”

Changes within the system, including a trend toward higher bonds and rulings that make it easier for the government to argue for detention, have stacked the odds against detainees in an unprecedented way, immigration lawyers say.

“This is the worst I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen some pretty bad times,” said Caridad Pastor, who has practiced immigration law for almost four decades.

Shifting Sands

Dara Reid was apologetic.

The New York City-based immigration judge spoke as she eyed a large television screen in a near-empty room in the Varick Street courthouse.

Two men peered back. One, Lizandro Antonio Martinez Aguilar, was conferenced in from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the second place he had been jailed since his arrest in September. His attorney, Roger Pierre Asmar, joined remotely from his Manhattan office.

Martinez Aguilar came to the US from Guatemala 30 years ago; most recently he worked at a company that recycles cardboard containers. His four children are US-born citizens and his wife a legal permanent resident. All are factors that once might’ve made him a likely candidate to secure release on bond, not wearing an orange jumpsuit and locked up for months in an infamous prison.

“I have bad news for you,” Reid told Martinez Aguilar, through an interpreter, during the March 11 hearing. “The law keeps changing and unfortunately for you, it changed last Friday. It now tells me I don’t have jurisdiction over your bond. I’m so sorry.”

For almost three decades, the federal government interpreted immigration law such that undocumented immigrants arrested inside the country generally had the right to a bond hearing in immigration court. But to boost its crackdown, the Trump administration in July declared that even those who have lived here for years must stay in custody without the chance for release. The reinterpretation of the law turbocharged President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation efforts.

The federal government has since spent billions of dollars buying property and warehouses to build new ICE detention centers to house the tens of thousands of immigrants they expected to arrest.

A precedent-setting September 2025 Board of Immigration Appeals decision, Matter of Yajure Hurtado, upheld the new policy interpretation; immigration judges were told to honor it.

In February, Judge Sunshine Sykes of the US District Court for the Central District of California nullified Yajure Hurtado, condemning the executive branch for continuing to detain noncitizens unlawfully despite her series of prior orders against it.

Sykes ruled the practice not only deprived established immigrants of economic stability and dignity “but it also harms their families, communities, and the fabric of this very nation.”

Her opinion reopened the path for many detainees to ask immigration judges to consider releasing them on bond. Then, on March 6, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit paused her decision and plunged detainees like Martinez Aguilar back into limbo.

Five days later, he came before Reid.

After apologizing, the judge gave the man and his lawyer a few minutes to discuss their options off-camera. Both were exasperated but Asmar urged Martinez Aguilar to keep fighting and not accept deportation to get out of prison.

Minutes later, Asmar asked the judge to issue a decision spelling out that she wouldn’t grant Martinez Aguilar bond because she lacked the authority to do so. Reid agreed.

That decision gives Asmar a legal basis to move to the next step, filing a habeas corpus petition in federal district court that alleges Martinez Aguilar’s detention is unlawful. If they decide to file the petition and it’s granted, it could pave the way for his release. Judges in multiple hearings observed by Bloomberg Law reporters echoed Reid’s reasoning in their rulings that week.

“I’m denying bond, citing no jurisdiction,” San Antonio Immigration Judge Thomas Crossan Jr. told a detainee, adding that he would have granted bond if not for the circuit decision.

Price of Freedom

Raúl Estrada Valentin was picked up in January while eating a snack at work in Orange County, Calif. The 57-year-old’s ties to the US include his four adult children and three grandchildren, all of whom are US citizens. He also had a past arrest, in 1997, for giving police the wrong name during a traffic stop.

Where Estrada was born, how he entered the US, his job, and why he was detained this year weren’t discussed when he requested bond from Judge Carlos Maury on March 5.

That level of detail is commonplace in the public records for criminal arrests. But it’s often not easily accessible, or even discussed, in an immigration court system that logged more than 15,000 bond requests or hearings in January and February this year. That’s three times the number it handled during the same stretch in 2025, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, the nonpartisan court watchdog.

Sitting on his bench in Van Nuys, Calif., on March 5, Maury had granted four bonds that morning when Estrada appeared before him on a webcam from a complex that includes the ICE detention center in Adelanto, nearly 90 miles away. About a dozen other men sat in rows behind him in the brightly lit detention center room.

Lorena Fernandez, a lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security, conceded Estrada wasn’t a danger to the community.

Maury was also sent letters from two dozen community members—his children, their friends, and his co-workers and neighbors—vouching for his character and pleading for him to get bond, according to one of Estrada’s lawyers, Anna Rae Goethe of Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

Estrada just listened; he wasn’t offered a chance to speak.

Maury said he didn’t doubt Estrada would appear for future court hearings if released, but he seemed troubled that the man, here for decades, never had his kids take the necessary steps to help him apply for a green card and potentially win legal residency.

The judge sighed, and set Estrada’s bond at $25,000. “Your forms of relief to stay in the US are speculative,” Maury said.

Estrada’s was the highest bond set among the hearings observed by Bloomberg Law reporters. When it is required, the legal minimum bond to be released from immigration detention is $1,500, but these days the amount tends to be significantly higher.

California immigration lawyer Reyna Tanner said she once expected $5,000 “at the most” for such bond hearings, but that “we’ve been laughed at” making a similar request to judges of late. Some have set bond as high as $40,000.

“You’re asking these working-class people who are trying to raise a family to come up with that kind of money, or collateral to do that,” Tanner said. “You’re tying the hands of these people without money.”

Estrada became one of the lucky ones. Days after his hearing, and thanks in part to a GoFundMe campaign, he posted bond and was released from the ICE detention center, with his next court date scheduled for May.

Estrada’s life is different now.

Previously a landscaper who helped his neighbors and friends with “any little thing,” now Estrada is cleaning up his house, waiting to find out whether he will have to leave the country, and fearful he’ll be detained again, according to his daughter, Vanessa Uribe. She’s pregnant, she said, and unsure what the future holds for her family—when or how often her father will get to see his grandchild.

“We don’t know if he’s going to be able to stay or if he still has to go,” Uribe said.

‘They Always Win’

Prosecutors at every level have long leaned on two phrases when seeking to keep someone in custody: “flight risk” and “danger to the community.” What it takes to meet that bar has dropped significantly during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

How much so is not yet clear. Board of Immigration Appeals opinions since Trump’s inauguration have bolstered the list of reasons its judges can use to find someone a flight risk or dangerous and deny bond.

Two percent of charging documents filed by the government in February said individuals should be removed based on alleged criminal activity, according to an analysis by TRAC. The other 98% of cases were over alleged violations of immigration rules, like entering the US without inspection or staying past a visa’s expiration.

And each of the 15 precedential decisions regarding bond put out by Board of Immigration Appeals judges since Trump took office have sided with the government, finding an immigration judge should have denied bond or was right to do so, based on factors including a person’s delay in updating their home address with the immigration court, lack of a “valid, reliable and credible sponsor,” or recent DUI arrests.

“The BIA has been putting out decisions like wildfire,” said Mary Holper, clinical professor and director of the Immigration Clinic at Boston College Law School. “And advocate groups have done analyses that are basically like, there are no BIA decisions anymore where the government loses. They always win.”

Gustavo Alamo de la Rans, a Venezuelan national, was picked up by ICE in February, not long after he was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated. The federal judge who granted his habeas petition ordered the government to give him a bond hearing by March 13. That’s the day he came before Chicago Immigration Judge Matthew Beese.

After being sworn in, Alamo de la Rans told the judge he briefly drove after having beers to celebrate his son’s birth and a promotion at work. He vowed to never again drink and drive.

“I was four minutes away from my house and I made that mistake,” he testified remotely, through an interpreter, from a jail in Indiana. His lawyer, Vanessa Nunez, said Alamo de la Rans had lived in the same house for five years and has a partner and child who are US citizens. He is “adamantly” fighting the pending criminal case, she said. No one mentioned other criminal history.

The government’s attorney, Jonathan Panton, said drunk driving is risky behavior, and Alamo de la Rans admitted to it. “This is a threat to the community,” Panton said.

Beese said the burden of proof was on Alamo de la Rans, who hadn’t put paperwork from his criminal case in the immigration court record. And he had told Beese his blood-alcohol level was 0.15 percent when he was pulled over. That was enough for the judge to declare him “a danger to the community” and deny the bond request.

Of the 55 hearings Bloomberg Law reporters observed, a respondent’s history of arrests, charges, or convictions came up in 18 cases, with 11 related to alcohol or domestic violence. One case in New York involved a man caught masturbating outside a public elementary school; he was denied bond.

Last month, Judge Clay D. Land of the US District Court for the Middle District of Georgia ordered the administration to produce detailed information about bond hearings held between January and March 2026, as well as communications with guidance about bond or any policy that has changed compared to prior years.

Land, a nominee of former President George W. Bush, said he was skeptical of claims that “the entire bond system has been rendered a sham” but acknowledged the argument from the detainees and their lawyers who he said asserted a “dramatic reduction in bond approvals recently without an obvious change in circumstances that would reasonably explain the change.”

The case is pending.

A Waiting Bus

Juan De Dios Lopez Carlin was mulling his options.

He had two, Immigration Judge Bryan DePowell told the skinny, tattooed man during their hearing March 11 at the ICE Processing Center in Adelanto, Calif., about an hour north of San Bernardino.

Lopez could remain locked up at the detention center, or he could accept a final order of removal that would send him back to Mexico.

“I love this country, but I do want to fight my case outside” of detention, Lopez told the judge through a Spanish language interpreter, adding, “I can’t be here any longer. I’m getting sick too often.” (In a lawsuit filed in January, Adelanto detainees cited unsanitary conditions at the facility and said they have been denied medical care and proper food and water.)

He also noted he had applied for a special visa for crime victims.

Lopez appeared without an attorney, drastically reducing his odds of release. Immigrant detainees have a right to a lawyer, but unlike criminal defendants, they typically aren’t guaranteed one if they can’t find or hire one on their own.

Nonprofit and immigrant defense groups have stepped in to help. Still, the Vera Institute, which tracks and represents incarcerated people, estimated that 55% of immigrants with pending deportation cases as of February did not have a lawyer.

The judge told Lopez he didn’t have jurisdiction to consider a bond hearing.

Lopez tried one more tack: Could he possibly be freed for just one month, to sell his belongings, including his car and motorcycle?

No, came the reply.

“If there isn’t a way for me to fight my case outside of here, then it’s best I just go to Mexico, because I can’t be here any longer,” said the detainee.

As DePowell ordered the man deported, Lopez leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He asked how soon he’d leave.

Likely within a day or two, the judge said. Buses leave Adelanto for Mexico daily.