‘All Hands on Deck’: Lawyers Mobilize to Help Free Detainees

James Jenkins is no stranger to painstaking work.

But when he returned to the practice of law after spending years restoring and reprinting centuries-old novels, the Virginia-based attorney didn’t know he’d become a prolific filer of an increasingly common federal document: habeas corpus petitions seeking to free detained immigrants.

He has filed nearly 50 petitions around the country in the past year, he said, some with the assistance of various nonprofits. Tens of thousands of immigrants, including some who have lived and worked for years in the US, have been detained under the Trump administration crackdown. Many have a slim chance of release or even a bond hearing without an attorney’s help.

Jenkins is among scores of attorneys answering the call. Organizations have sprung up to train lawyers in immigration habeas claims—an uncommon practice until recently—and public defenders are increasingly taking on cases that would have been rare for them only 12 months ago.

There are more than 22,000 active habeas cases pending nationwide, according to habeasdockets.org, a volunteer-run tracking group. And organizations working to file these petitions have been overwhelmingly successful.

For example, the Illinois Habeas Project, which launched last year, had filed 64 petitions as of mid-March, and 40 people have been released, it said.

Jenkins says he gets more referrals and requests for assistance than he can reasonably take on. He still owns his publishing company, but filing petitions has become nearly a full-time job, he said.

“I’ve seen people that are being torn from families, from their friends, their homes and communities, and being detained under often horrific conditions and being rushed through the deportation process without due process of law,” Jenkins said.

“Attorneys need to step up and do something to stop this from happening,” he said.

Peter Markowitz, co-director of New York’s National Immigration Habeas Institute, recalled something a doctor told him: The second Trump administration is for lawyers what the Covid-19 pandemic was to the medical profession.

“We are all hands on deck,” he said.

Closing the Gap

Some 68,000 noncitizens were in immigration detention as of last month, 80% more than the nearly 37,700 people detained at the end of fiscal year 2024.

A Department of Justice spokesperson said the “level of illegal aliens currently detained is a direct result of this Administration’s strong border security policies to keep the American people safe” and, in response to questions about the immense habeas caseload, blamed “rogue judges.”

“The Trump Administration is complying with court orders and fully enforcing federal immigration law,” it said in a statement.

The need to file petitions for habeas corpus—a Latin legal phrase that means “you should have the body” and requires a judge to bring a detainee to court and hear their plea for release—was spurred not only by the administration’s push to deport more people, but also its claim that it has the power to keep noncitizens detained without bond hearings, which has resulted in significant litigation. The administration has also re-detained people who’d previously been released, and tried to keep noncitizens in custody even if they likely can’t be removed from the country in a reasonable timeframe, attorneys told Bloomberg Law.

There are significant barriers to filing habeas petitions without an attorney. And if a noncitizen has representation in immigration court, their attorney likely doesn’t have experience litigating in federal district court, where habeas petitions are filed.

As a result, law schools and legal aid groups have launched “habeas projects” around the country to train litigators and help them coordinate with clients’ immigration counsel.

A project in New York has filed 35 habeas petitions since December, while a counterpart in New England has vetted nearly 200 cases. One in Minnesota screened more than 100 cases since it launched in February and matched more than 50 of them with volunteer habeas attorneys.

Sarah Brenes, executive director of the University of Minnesota Law School’s Binger Center for New Americans, said during the administration’s surge in the Twin Cities, attorneys saw “a growing need to advocate for individuals in cases where it seemed clear that their detention was not sustained through any laws.”

Federal Defenders

Federal public defenders are also being appointed to represent noncitizens in habeas cases.

Since January 2025, federal defenders filed 756 immigration habeas petitions, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis of court dockets through mid-March. In the 10 years before 2025, defenders filed only 437.

Los Angeles deputy federal public defender Jonathan Aminoff said his office has always handled immigration-related habeas matters, but requests are surging now.

“The current policy of detaining everyone without consideration of whether a deportation can actually be achieved or whether detention is necessary is resulting in hundreds of people unnecessarily being detained in horrible conditions for no apparent reason,” said Aminoff, chief of the office’s Non-Capital Habeas Unit.

In a December news release, Seattle’s federal public defender office said it’s working with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and the Seattle Clemency Project to help detained noncitizens, and noted it had “ramped up” its representation of people in ICE custody. Among the releases they won was that of a Nicaraguan citizen who had been tortured by that government; the federal defenders successfully averted his removal to a third country where he’d never been.

‘Scratching the Surface’

Bardis Vakili, legal director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said the need for individual habeas work became especially clear after the US Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez, which bars district courts from granting classwide injunctive relief in certain immigration matters.

Vakili said the combination of that ruling and the expansion of mandatory detention authority has created “a moment for advocates to step up.”

The National Immigration Habeas Institute launched in August because it saw a need early on in the administration to train immigration attorneys to navigate the federal courts.

“We were quite concerned immigration courts were no longer going to be a fruitful ground for meaningful defense, and that much of the battle would need to be taken into federal courts through habeas proceedings,” Markowitz said. “Sadly, we not only nailed the anticipated need, we also underestimated the need.”

The group has held trainings in New York City and Los Angeles, with 135 attorneys participating across both sessions, and its free training videos have been provided to 100 additional nonprofit lawyers. The attorneys that have gone through the program have filed 50 petitions so far.

“We are only scratching the surface of need,” Markowitz said.