By Ben Warren, bwarren@detroitnews.com
Yarmin Rodriguez-Carmona was outside playing basketball. Jesus Castro Sanchez was operating a leaf blower near a busy intersection. And Alicia Mauricio Diego was in the passenger seat of her cousin’s car on the way to the supermarket.
All were swept up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol agents in the Chicago area in September and October, then taken across state lines to the North Lake Processing Center in northern Michigan, where they were held without bond.
Each of them, like hundreds of other immigrants held in Michigan detention centers, turned to the federal court system for help.
More than ever, efforts by immigrants, their lawyers and allies to gain release from ICE custody pending their deportation hearings are playing out in federal district courts and appeals circuits around the country.
Here in Michigan, it appears to be working.
Attorneys have filed hundreds of petitions in Michigan’s two federal court districts requesting bond hearings for their detained clients, and they have won in almost every case decided so far. A federal judge in California further boosted their efforts last week when she ruled that most people in ICE custody were eligible for bond.
Meanwhile, a case in federal appeals court will determine whether ICE must release more than 600 Illinois residents — including almost 200 detained in Michigan — after Judge Jeffrey Cummings ruled earlier this month that they were likely arrested in violation of a 2022 settlement agreement.
New court ruling guarantees bond hearings
A federal judge in California ruled last week that detained immigrants across the U.S. must be allowed a bond hearing in front of an immigration judge, reversing a Department of Homeland Security policy in place since July.
“We welcome this decision and expect it to be immediately applied here in Michigan for non-citizens to be able to apply for bond again, like they had before July 8,” said Ruby Robinson, senior managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, a legal advocacy nonprofit based in Ypsilanti.
The ruling from Judge Sunshine S. Sykes of California’s Central District gave class status to all non-citizens who entered the United States “without inspection … and were not apprehended upon arrival,” a group that DHS has placed in mandatory detention over the last four months.
Sykes wrote that DHS had “failed on a systemic basis” to provide non-citizens arrested by ICE with rights they are entitled to under federal law.
In response to the ruling, Trump administration officials said they believe they are following the intent of the law and that allowing detainees out on bond makes little sense, given that they have an incentive to flee.
“President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe,” Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin told Politico in a Nov. 28 report.
Without an automatic bond hearing, detainees must request one from the immigration judge, then demonstrate that they are not a flight risk nor a public safety threat if released pending their next court date, Robinson said.
National ICE statistics show that most detainees return for their deportation hearings after being released on bond. In October, individuals who were given an ankle monitor or cellphone tracking program instead of being detained attended 98.6% of their hearings nationwide, according to ICE figures. Currently, 7,823 people are enrolled in detention alternative programs under the jurisdiction of the Detroit ICE field office.
Representatives from ICE’s Detroit office referred The Detroit News to DHS media relations.
Since July, many people arrested by ICE — including hundreds now held in Michigan detention centers — were never given that chance.
The federal government may still appeal the ruling in California, said Robinson, which would place the right to a bond hearing in jeopardy yet again.
The judge’s ruling also could cause administrative backlogs as a wave of bond hearings may further strain immigration courts around the country. “Even if someone is able to request a bond hearing, it may not happen immediately,” Robinson said.
Michigan district courts flooded with habeas petitions
More than 200 requests for bond hearings, legally known as habeas corpus petitions — Latin for “you have the body” — have been filed in Michigan’s federal courts in the last four months. That includes the eastern district in Detroit and the western district in Grand Rapids.
The News analyzed case information published on habeasdockets.org, a website run by John Cronan, a Chicago-based software engineer and activist who uses online federal court records to identify immigration-related bond petitions. In some cases, volunteers accessed documents via courthouse public terminals and uploaded them to the site.
The News reviewed opinions issued by federal judges in 26 cases in the Eastern District of Michigan and 53 cases in the Western District of Michigan, which represented close to one-third of all filings on the site. Some cases involved more than one individual, and some individuals were involved in more than one case.
In nearly every ruling The News reviewed, judges ruled in favor of immigrants detained in the state’s ICE detention facilities, forcing DHS to schedule a bond hearing in immigration court.
Many of these individuals were arrested in other states, then brought to the North Lake Processing Center, a privately run facility in Michigan’s Lake County, where more than 1,200 immigrants are detained, according to figures released this month by ICE.
Court documents show that these men and women, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for over a decade, include parents and spouses of U.S. citizens and people with pending asylum or green card applications.
Most were arrested in Metro Detroit or Chicago’s Latino enclaves. Others came from as far away as New York, Vermont and Washington, D.C.
“It raises a question as to why the government felt the need to change 30 years of the bond rules to mandate the detention of what will come out to be millions of long-time residents of the U.S.,” said Russell Abrutyn, a Southfield-based immigration attorney who has filed seven bond petitions for half a dozen clients in recent months.
Abrutyn said there’s been a “massive wave” of petitions filed on behalf of immigrants detained by ICE. When granted, these petitions force ICE to schedule a bond hearing within a week or release the detainee.
The website habeasdockets.org was tracking 4,638 active cases as of Dec. 2. The Western District of Michigan, where most cases involving North Lake detainees are filed, has more than 100 of these cases on its docket.
Immigration court judges consider how long detainees have been in the U.S., whether they have a criminal record and their family and property ties to the country to decide whether they can be released, Abrutyn said.
In almost every recent case in Detroit’s immigration court, immigrants who have won a habeas petition were released on bond. Just seven of the 58 people who won a bond hearing through the habeas process still appeared to be in ICE custody on Dec. 2, according to the agency’s detainee locator database.
Hundreds wait for Seventh Circuit decision
Many of the immigrant detainees fighting for a bond hearing in Michigan courts were arrested during “Operation Midway Blitz,” an escalation of immigration enforcement in the Chicago area since September.
But an ongoing court case in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals could force ICE to release some of them immediately.
Back in 2022, ICE settled a suit — commonly referred to as “Castañon Nava” after the named plaintiff — alleging that the agency had made improper warrantless arrests. The agency signed a consent decree agreeing that in Illinois and surrounding states, its agents would limit their use of arrests without a warrant, as well as where and why they made these arrests.
In March of this year, attorneys for 22 people arrested by ICE in Illinois and Missouri claimed the agency had violated the agreement.
Judge Jeffrey Cummings ruled in November that ICE must release more than 600 people whose arrests likely violated the 2022 agreement on warrantless arrests. Of those, 176 are detained at Michigan’s North Lake facility, according to Richard Kessler, a Grand Rapids-based immigration lawyer, who is familiar with the case.
But just a day before they were supposed to be released, ICE and DHS lawyers filed an emergency appeal in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Oral arguments in the case began Dec. 2.
Who’s taking their case to court?
The News identified a total of 241 bond petitions on behalf of immigrant detainees filed in Michigan federal courts through Dec. 2 this year, mostly in the Western District.
There were just a few petitions filed before early September, when the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the Trump administration’s stance on mandatory detention. But more than 170 suits have been filed since the beginning of November.
The News reviewed opinion filings in cases representing 66 individuals, 58 of whom were granted a bond hearing by the judge. Three cases were voluntarily dismissed because ICE released the detainees on parole.
Several petitions failed on procedural grounds — including a case on behalf of 97 Illinois residents detained in Michigan filed using only the detainees’ initials — but just one was denied on the merits. In that case, the judge ruled that since the man in ICE custody illegally reentered the U.S. before his most recent detention, the federal government could hold him without bond.
Most of the people represented in the habeas petitions — 31 of them — were from Mexico, while another six were from Guatemala and five from Venezuela. At least one immigrant from Nicaragua, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Turkey and India filed a case.
Thirteen of the individuals were arrested in Michigan, but most were from Chicago and its suburbs. At least two people were arrested in New Jersey, two in Indiana and one in New York, Vermont and Washington, D.C. The arrest location was not included in 12 cases.
More than half of the detainees represented in the filings entered the U.S. more than a decade ago; 24 of them had been in the country for more than 20 years. The longest-tenured resident entered the U.S. from Mexico in 1989.
Fourteen people who filed habeas petitions have spouses or children who are U.S. citizens, and at least one was on the path to a green card through his wife, a U.S. citizen. His I-130 application had been approved, and he was awaiting an interview before his arrest.
‘It’s overwhelming the system’
In August, before ICE ramped up enforcement in Chicago, Detroit’s immigration court had more than 30,000 cases pending, leading to average wait times of nearly two years, according to a database maintained by the Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Abrutyn, one of the Michigan immigration attorneys, said the influx of detainees arrested in other states is making things worse.
When ICE whisks detainees across state lines in the days after they’ve been apprehended, it can prevent them from contacting their families and attorneys, he said.
An immigration lawyer in Chicago or New York who helped one of the detainees with an asylum or green card application before might not be admitted to the bar in Michigan.
“And the local immigration bar, as vibrant and good as it is, there aren’t enough attorneys,” Abrutyn said. “It’s overwhelming the system.”
The case of Willian Alberto Gimenez Gonzalez shows how complicated it can be to handle these situations in court.
Gimenez Gonzalez, who was arrested outside a barber shop in Chicago’s Little Village, was originally held at the Broadview ICE processing facility in the Chicago suburbs. He was quickly transferred to North Lake in Michigan, but he never had the chance to tell his attorney.
His Illinois-based lawyer originally filed a habeas petition in the Northern District of Illinois, then transferred it to the Western District of Michigan. But the lawyer had named the Chicago ICE field office in the original filing, not the Detroit office, which now had jurisdiction over Gimenez Gonzalez, since he was in a Michigan detention facility.
That rendered the petition moot, and he had to start over with a Michigan-based lawyer.
Far from their families, detainees face a difficult decision
Time in a detention center is especially difficult for detainees who have been taken far from their homes.
“It’s almost impossible for their family to visit them,” Abrutyn said. He’s handled cases for immigrants arrested in Vermont and New York.
Statistics released by ICE earlier this month show that the average length of a stay in one of Michigan’s immigration detention centers since Oct. 1 was more than a month at every site. At North Lake, where most detainees in Michigan are held, it was 43 days.
Detainees who refuse to sign a deportation order may change their mind after months in a detention center, said Robinson, the MIRC attorney.
Indeed, more immigrants in ICE custody in Michigan are choosing to file for voluntary departure, according to TRAC’s immigration court data.
From January to August of this year, about 10% of immigration proceedings involving detainees ended in voluntary departure, compared to just 1.7% of cases where the person named in the case was not detained.
The number of detainees choosing to self-deport spiked in July and August, after the DHS policy change made most immigrants in ICE custody ineligible to get out on bond.
“The delays and separation cause people to make decisions that 6 months ago they wouldn’t have to make,” Robinson said.
An ICE spokesperson wrote in an email to the News, “ICE presents aliens with all of their options [including] contacts for legal services to assist them in their immigration proceedings.”
