As more states seek ways to limit immigration enforcement, a Stateline analysis shows one tactic has had an effect: making it more difficult for local law enforcement to hand over people they are holding in city or county jails to federal immigration authorities.

The analysis found that states with strict non-cooperation policies — Oregon, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Washington state — have the lowest rates of immigration arrests in jails.

The highest rates were generally in states that limit or bar so-called sanctuary policies. Those states include Wyoming, West Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.

New Mexico, a border state, also was one of the five states with the highest local jail arrest rate despite having some statewide policies limiting cooperation. The state ethics commission sued the state corrections department in July charging violations of a state law banning most cooperation.

However, early threats from the Trump administration to target sanctuary states for more street arrests had uneven results through March 10, the latest data released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and obtained by the California-based Deportation Data Project. The analysis includes arrests since Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of the second Trump administration.

President Donald Trump announced March 5 he would replace high-profile Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and that Markwayne Mullin would take over March 31. Mullin has pledged a more low-key approach to ramping up immigration enforcement.

Stateline’s analysis doesn’t reflect a new wave of arrests starting in June that has pushed arrests to new highs, or new airport arrests in recent months cracking down on people with expired visas. But the data does show an administration struggling to get arrest numbers up everywhere, said Jacob Kang-Brown, a criminologist who did a similar analysis in October for the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts-based think tank that seeks to reduce incarceration.

Last year border czar Tom Homan said he would “flood the zone” with extra street enforcement in sanctuary cities. States without sanctuary policies, such as Florida, would be treated differently, he said.  “We don’t have that problem in Florida, where every sheriff is working with us,” Homan said.

But Kang-Brown said cooperative states did not get a break from street operations and raids.

“They don’t stop doing stuff in the community just because they can get in the jails. It was very widespread arrests around the country, even in states that collaborated enthusiastically and were pushing ICE for even more enforcement, like Florida.” Kang-Brown said.

In the Stateline analysis, Florida’s rate of street arrests ranked 40th, about the same as Washington state, which has restrictions on immigration arrests at jails, and higher than Connecticut, which has similar restrictions. Connecticut Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont rejects the sanctuary label, calling the restrictions “clear rules for cooperation with federal immigration authorities.”

Some states with policies restricting jail transfers to ICE did see high rates of street arrests last winter amid attacks on what the administration often calls  “sanctuary politicians”  in those states. Maine, Minnesota and the District of Columbia were among  the 10 states with the highest rates of street arrests as a share of noncitizens, and many of those arrested did not have criminal records.

Operation Metro Surge, concentrated in Minnesota’s Minneapolis-St. Paul over the winter, ended in two killings by federal agents and hundreds of millions of dollars in business losses.

But cooperative states also saw high rates of street arrests: Seven of the 10 states with the highest rates of street arrests as a share of noncitizens were ones with cooperative policies. The very highest was West Virginia, where there were only 17,100 noncitizens counted in 2024 but hundreds were arrested in a single “surge team” operation in January.

After criticism from the Trump administration, some states have backed off some of the more far-reaching sanctuary policies, but others have been emboldened by the unpopularity of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Stateline’s analysis underscores the fact that local jails, and how they handle ICE detainer requests to hold inmates for immigration arrests, are a powerful tool.

ICE often criticizes cities and states with sanctuary policies for releasing violent criminals, but only a small fraction of arrestees are violent criminals and a large number have only immigration violations.

“Generally if someone poses a real threat to safety, public safety or national security, that detainer is generally respected,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank specializing in immigration research.

But, she added, “if someone got a ding on a speeding ticket and otherwise has a clean record, then there are some places that are not going to hand that person over or hold that person for ICE.”

Report disputes claims about recent ICE arrests in WV, says 75% of immigrants had no criminal record

ICE made a record 51,000 arrests in July but hasn’t released detailed information by state since March.

For all ICE arrests combined, the highest rates were in Wyoming, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama and New Mexico, all having more than 300 arrests per 10,000 noncitizens through March.

The street arrests pulled in more people without criminal records — 81% of the Washington, D.C., street arrests were for immigration-related offenses only and the share was about two-thirds or more in 14 other states with statewide sanctuary policies.

Some states have tried to strike a balance, allowing jail transfers to ICE for a list of crimes, including charged crimes as well as convictions, and for court orders of removal, which can be issued for some immigration offenses.

In New Jersey, the state legislature backed off some proposed changes that would have made it harder for ICE to make arrests in local jails. The law as signed in March maintained controversial exceptions for immigrants with removal orders and for immigrants facing charges and well as convictions among a list of serious crimes.

Passage of the law came after the Trump administration in March highlighted the case of a New Jersey man charged with sex crimes against a child younger than 15 years old, calling it a “New Jersey nightmare” and claiming the man might have qualified for release under state policies at the time, despite a detainer request. Court records indicate the man was never released and remains in an Ocean County jail after pleading guilty pending sentencing in September.

In some states, including Maryland, the Trump administration and local sheriffs have challenged policies against extending local jail time or responding to immigration detainers. Courts have ruled that such detainers are voluntary requests that states and cities may turn down legally, and there are preliminary injunctions in California and Washington state against withholding some or all federal funding because of it. Those injunctions are under appeal.

A similar lawsuit by the administration against New Jersey cities was dismissed in June.

That hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from hectoring state and municipalities it sees as overly lax on detainer policies.

“Sanctuary policies continue to disregard U.S. immigration law and put communities at risk by releasing illegal aliens prone to criminal activity into our communities,” said Robert Guadian, the Washington, D.C., field office director for ICE’s enforcement and removals office, in an Aug. 6 statement. Guadian complained that two young men had been released from a Maryland jail in Prince George’s County after criminal charges were dismissed. They were later arrested by ICE in separate traffic stops.

Delaware’s legislature in June approved a bill, now awaiting Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer’s signature, with exceptions only for certain crime convictions.

New Mexico State Ethics Commission sues state Corrections secretary over probation ICE referrals

Even as the Trump administration has been frustrated by legal attempts to force more compliance with detainers, it’s been more successful with encouraging participation in the 287(g) program that allows local officers to investigate immigration themselves and help turn prisoners over to ICE. The programs are in 39 states, but are heavily concentrated in Texas and Florida.

“ICE is actually paying the salaries of some local sheriffs or law enforcement, and that’s a huge savings for their jurisdictions,” said Putzel-Kavanaugh, of the Migration Policy Institute. “For a local town or sheriff that could be huge.”

The tension between federal immigration authorities and local jail authorities has been around for decades, noted Graber, of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Local and state authorities have the best possible awareness of local crime, she noted, and fingerprints from their arrest get transmitted automatically to immigration authorities to choose candidates for arrest and deportation.

“ICE has been pursuing the local law enforcement’s broad reach into communities and their ability to surveil the public at a much greater level for a long time,” Graber said. “That’s why they want instant information about every person who’s arrested.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

A largely overlooked part of the executive order President Donald Trump issued this week scaling back the schedule for childhood vaccines threatens legal action against the four states that don’t allow personal or religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements.

Those states — California, Connecticut, Maine and New York — are among the states with the highest immunization rates, and they are among those that have been most successful in controlling the worst measles outbreak in more than three decades.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia require students to have certain vaccines before attending public school. All allow exemptions for children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. Forty-six states plus the District of Columbia also allow exemptions for religious and/or personal beliefs.

Trump’s order, which he signed on Monday, says the attorney general will take legal action against states that do not provide “religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”

Some health officials said that Trump’s order, which has questionable legal authority, is unlikely to prompt the states without nonmedical exemptions to change course. And any legal action would take years to wend its way through the courts.

But they criticized the executive order, and its legal threats, for contributing to the misinformation and skepticism that have lowered vaccination rates nationwide.

“It puts a lot of misinformation and a lot of fear and doubt in parents’ minds,” said Dr. Thomas Lew, clinical assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “It clouds the conversation around vaccines and their importance and their safety.”

Dr. Molly O’Shea, a pediatrician who practices in suburban Detroit, warned that nonmedical exemptions “increase the number of parents who opt to forgo one or more vaccines for any list of reasons.”

“The learning environment is then more fragile because of the risk of disruption by infectious illness,” she said.

At the same time, O’Shea said, public health requires empathy with parents who are sincerely worried about their children’s well-being and may have been misinformed about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

“Families who are opting not to vaccinate are doing it from the same place that we’re recommending vaccines. They want their children healthy and well,” O’Shea said. “Just because we come to the opposite conclusion doesn’t mean we didn’t start with the same values.”

In response to Trump’s order, political leaders and health officials in many states, including California, Connecticut,  Maine and New York, vowed to maintain their vaccination rules.

California currently has 52 measles cases, Connecticut has two, Maine has five and New York has 10. All four states have vaccination rates higher than 95%, considered critical to “herd immunity” that can protect the unvaccinated to some degree.

“Maine will continue to follow the science and the facts, and our approach to vaccines remains unchanged by yesterday’s executive order,” Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said in a statement published Tuesday.

As of early August, measles cases were at their highest level since 1991. The states with the highest numbers were South Carolina (670), Utah (524), Pennsylvania (216), Texas (216) and Virginia (176). All of those states allow families to opt out of the school vaccine requirement for personal or religious reasons.

Of the five states with the most cases, only Virginia has a school vaccination rate of more than 95%.

Virginia’s statewide rate was 95.6% for 2024-25, but the measles outbreak was in two rural counties west of Richmond, where measles vaccination rates are less than 75%.

Deaths from another vaccine-preventable childhood illness, whooping cough, also are on the rise. Last year, there were 32 whooping cough deaths, the most since at least 1999. Before vaccines became available in the 1940s, as many as 200,000 children contracted whooping cough every year and 9,000 died.

Whooping cough death statistics for every state were not available, but Kentucky reported three whooping cough deaths last year, its first fatalities in five years, while Louisiana reported two deaths.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Federal immigration agents are employing new tactics — from arresting academics at airports to setting up a checkpoint at a popular creek in a National Forest — to boost their arrest numbers, leading to more arrests in July than in any previous month of the Trump administration.

Though it is striving to fulfill the White House’s demand for more arrests, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is still falling short of the Trump administration’s announced goal of 2,000 arrests per day. And more arrests won’t necessarily translate into more deportations, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

“The focus is so much on the arrest numbers that the mission seems a little confused to the general public,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said.

She noted that many of the new arrests catch non-criminals in a legal “gray area,” such as having an expired visa while applying for another legal status. Such people are hardly the “worst of the worst” the Trump administration has identified as its top targets, she said.

“Meeting some arbitrary arrest quota doesn’t necessarily serve this larger purpose of deporting a larger number of people, so there’s a disconnect about what the mission really is.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, told Stateline it arrested about 51,000 immigrants in July, up from 43,000 in June and the highest number recorded by the Trump administration. The administration did not release state specific numbers.

The department said that last month it arrested an average of 20-40 people per day at airports, as federal agents targeted passengers with expired visas.  According to media reports, those arrested last month  included a Cameroonian researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore  — a Fulbright scholar — and a University of Maryland instructor from Ethiopia who was detained as he returned  from a conference where he accepted a Teacher of the Year award. Advocates suggested immigrants with expired visas should not travel without consulting an attorney.

Arrests based on expired visas are likely to continue and will accelerate in September when a new rule takes effect that sets stricter time limits on visas for students, exchange visitors and foreign media.

Michael Clemens, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins, has estimated that by limiting the number of international STEM students, instructors and researchers in the U.S., the new rule could cost the nation’s economy as much as $145 billion per year by 2035.

“Implementation of the rule will cause large numbers of highly-skilled students and scholars to fall out of status. We’ll certainly be seeing a lot more cases like the seizure of Fatima Ameaka,” Clemens said, referring to the Johns Hopkins researcher from Cameroon, an expert in disease outbreaks.

In an interview, Clemens said federal immigration authorities “see airports as an easy bottleneck because everyone in there is ID’d, so it’s lower cost to seize people there than in any other place except a prison.”

Kate Angustia, supervisory policy and practice counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group, said it’s a “misconception” that the people being arrested at airports let their visas expire and therefore forfeited their legal status.

“Many of these folks are in a lawful period of authorized stay,” Augusta said. “This means that longstanding policy and practice has been, for decades, to allow these people to remain here as their legal processes continue to be processed by the government.”

DHS said in a statement to Stateline that “this administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.”

An asylum seeker from Zambia, working as a registered nurse at a Portland, Maine, hospital, was released Thursday after her arrest at Boston Logan International Airport sparked protests.

“Nurses in Maine found out one of their own was locked up and sprung into action to get her out,” Puneet Maharaj, a local nurse union representative, said in a statement.

On July 26, immigration agents set up a checkpoint near Wilson Creek in North Carolina, a site that is popular with Hispanic residents and is managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Federal agents  arrested 13 people, according to the local sheriff’s office.

There were local protests by Methodist clergy and relatives who said at least some of those arrested had no criminal record and entered the country legally, contradicting a social media post by Republican North Carolina Assembly Speaker Destin Hall calling those arrested “a gang of previously arrested illegal aliens.”

The Sierra Club also protested the arrests.

“Bringing immigration enforcement into public recreation areas undermines the sense of safety and belonging that these spaces provide and could discourage people from visiting national forests and other outdoor spaces altogether,” the organization wrote in a statement.

At the end of July, federal agents and state highway patrol officers conducted roadside checks of trucks in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio “to crack down on illegal, unvetted drivers and unsafe vehicles.” DHS said it detained 51 drivers who were in the country illegally.

The agency has said it is “delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and other criminals.” But less than a third of current detainees have a criminal conviction and 40% have never been accused of anything but non-criminal immigration violations, according to statistics reviewed by Stateline through early July.

The statistics also show that about 2,000 detainees a month have been freed after court-ordered bond hearings as many federal judges, some of them Trump appointees, have ruled against the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory detention for many immigrants. The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to rule on the legality of the policy in its October term.

July also saw two immigrants shot and killed during traffic stops in Texas and Maine. After a brief pause, President Donald Trump ordered such traffic stops to continue, though ICE officers will now wear body cameras when they pull over drivers, according to border czar Tom Homan.

Also in July, a Mexican man who had a valid tourist visa was struck and killed by a truck after he fled ICE officers who pulled him over in St. Augustine, Florida.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

U.S. employers shed 23,000 jobs in July, and the employment count for earlier months was revised downward by 103,000 jobs as labor shortages begin to weigh on hiring, according to new statistics released Friday by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“There’s no sugarcoating the overarching message in the July jobs report,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, wrote in a social media post. “The economy is struggling. Job growth is at a virtual standstill.”

Inflation could be taking a toll as employment in general merchandise retailing declined by 21,000 jobs and gas stations cut 5,000 jobs.  Employment in finance also dropped by 14,000, continuing a slide of 121,000 jobs since a recent peak in May 2025.

The number of health care jobs grew by 22,000 in July, but that was lower than the monthly average gain of 36,000 in the past  year.

The federal government also revised the job numbers for May and June, subtracting 66,000 from the May total and 37,000 from June, even though the World Cup boosted employment during those months.  The adjusted job growth numbers for May and June are 63,000 and 20,000, respectively.

Small businesses saw “a surprising and substantial tightening of the labor market” in July, according to a report from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which represents  300,000 small and independent business owners. In a survey, 27% of members cited labor supply and quality as their single most important problem, up from 19% in June and the 12% historical average.

The cost of health insurance also stood out as a top concern in a separate NFIB report. That was especially true in Texas, one of 10 states that has not  expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to provide coverage for a broader population of lower-income people. In Texas, almost 15% of NFIB members said health insurance costs were their single most important problem, the highest of any state, compared to about 10% nationally.

“I have yet to have a conversation with anyone who doesn’t think this is a problem and in most cases it’s their biggest problem,” NFIB State Director Jeff Burdett said.

Nationally, most small businesses can’t afford to provide health insurance at all, according to NFIB surveys, he said.

“They want to provide health insurance, they need to provide it to be competitive, it’s just cost prohibitive,” Burdett said. “What that means is that talented workers are bypassing small businesses entirely in favor of large employers.”

Another recent employment report from ADP, a payroll processor, also pointed to a sudden tightening of the labor market: The pay for job changers rose at the fastest pace in a year.

“Job changers are highly sensitive to real-time economic conditions, and their rapid pay growth implies supply constraints in parts of the labor market,” Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist, said in a statement.

This story has been updated to clarify the source of a survey about health insurance costs from the National Federation of Independent Business. Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

New estimates put the U.S. undocumented immigrant population in mid-2024 at 14.6 million to 15.8 million, a sharp increase from around 11 million in the 2010s. 

Since then the non-citizen population has likely dropped, but the number is unclear since immigrants facing hostility are reluctant to cooperate with government surveys. 

The spike in the number of people living in the United States without documentation included between 5.4 million and 6.3 million people with some protection against deportation, such as humanitarian parole or temporary protected status. 

The Migration Policy Institute, which pegged the 2024 number at 15.8 million, said in a report released Wednesday that the increase was “primarily driven by record unauthorized migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border and the Biden administration’s wide use of humanitarian parole programs to reduce chaos at the border.” 

Another group, The Center for Migration Studies of New York, estimated the undocumented population at 14.6 million for 2024. Both reports said they have proprietary methods of adjusting U.S. Census Bureau data and other data to make the estimates.

In the estimate from the Center for Migration Studies, California had the largest undocumented population at 2.6 million, followed by Texas (2.3 million), Florida (1.4 million), New York (920,000), New Jersey (703,000), Illinois (583,000), Georgia (502,000), North Carolina (460,000), Washington state (367,000) and Virginia (342,000). 

Neither group had estimates from beyond 2024, though one monthly federal survey, the Current Population Survey, shows almost 3 million fewer non-citizens in June 2026 than there were in January 2025 at the start of the Trump administration. Non-citizens could be legal immigrants on visas or awaiting citizenship, as well as undocumented immigrants.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security claimed in December that 2.5 million “illegal aliens” had left the country during the Trump administration, including through deportations and voluntary departures. 

The Center for Migration Studies in January called the DHS claim a “self-serving fantasy” based on a “flawed analysis of the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey.” Most likely the lower numbers in the survey reflect an unwillingness by immigrants to cooperate with surveys like the Current Population Survey, the January report said. 

“Large numbers of immigrants targeted by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) are now hunkering down in fear and are unlikely to provide any information about themselves to any strangers, especially government interviewers,” the report said.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Measles cases this year have surpassed all of 2025 to become the worst since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, with cases now in 44 states and the District of Columbia, according to a federal report released Friday. 

There were 2,318 confirmed cases as of July 23, compared with 2,289 in all of 2025, with 93% of cases for both years being among unvaccinated people, mostly younger than 20. 

There have been fewer hospitalizations this year, 151 compared with 243 last year, and no deaths yet, compared with three in 2025. The highest number of new cases was in mid-January 2026, when there were almost 300 new cases. 

The largest number of current cases are in South Carolina (670), Utah (522), Texas (188), Virginia (176), Florida (141) and Pennsylvania (134). Except for Virginia, all those states have childhood vaccination rates below the 95% level considered necessary to prevent outbreaks among unvaccinated people as of the 2024-25 school year. 

Virginia’s statewide rate was 95.6%, but the measles outbreak was in two rural counties west of Richmond where measles vaccination rates are less than 75%. 

The last time national cases were higher than 2025 and 2026 was in the 1990s as national vaccinations were still ramping up, with 9,643 cases in 1991 and almost 28,000 in 1990. 

Most states now have childhood vaccination rates below the 95% level considered necessary to prevent outbreaks among unvaccinated people, including people who choose not to be vaccinated and small children too young for the shots. 

Oklahoma has a low childhood vaccination rate of 88.7% and saw 20 cases last year, but only one so far this year. A foundation has sent a mobile health van around the state to vaccinate thousands of children. 

Delaware declared a new outbreak this week. The state’s first measles cases in a decade climbed to five cases in a few days. The state’s child vaccination rate is 94.1%. 

“High vaccination coverage has protected even the unvaccinated and undervaccinated because of herd protection, keeping measles at bay for the past few decades,”  said Dr. William Moss, director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University, in a published statement. 

“But in communities with pockets of susceptible individuals across a broad age range, measles has been able to take hold, infecting those who are susceptible and spreading rapidly,” he said.

The center used its own measles tracker to declare more cases in 2026 than last year as of July 21. 

The Pan American Health Organization is scheduled to review the U.S. measles status in November and consider revoking “elimination” status as it did for Canada last year.  

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Immigration arrests reached 1,593 per day in early July in a new push to detain and deport immigrants that has led to deaths in traffic stops. There were more than 43,000 arrests in June, the highest recorded by the Trump administration, according to statistics released Monday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reflecting new bookings into detention facilities. 

The June monthly total surpassed the 42,000 arrests in December, which included Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. If the rate for the first 11 days of July continues for a month it could be even higher, about 49,000 arrests.

Following fatal shootings, ICE officers ordered to wear body cameras at traffic stops

Arrest numbers reached as high as 2,000 per day over a five-day period in late June, according to a New York Times report. The Department of Homeland Security has said it is “delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and other criminals,” though less than a third of current detainees have a criminal conviction and 40% have never been accused of anything but non-criminal immigration violations, according to the statistics.

The Department of Homeland Security posted a list Monday of 15 immigrants previously convicted of serious crimes it said were arrested “while Americans enjoyed the weekend and the FIFA World Cup Finals.” 

The statistics also show that about 2,000 detainees a month have been freed by court-ordered bond hearings, as many federal judges, even many Trump appointees, rule against the administration’s policy of mandatory detention for many immigrants. The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to rule on the legality of the policy in its October term. 

Two immigrants were shot and killed during enforcement traffic stops in Texas and Maine this month. After a brief pause, President Donald Trump ordered traffic stops to continue. ICE officers will wear body cameras during such stops, according to border czar Tom Homan. 

A man from Mexico, apparently on a valid tourist visa for a vacation, was also killed in traffic in Florida after an encounter with ICE in July. Arrests in New York City immigration courts have also continued despite a court order banning the practice.  

Some of the unusual arrests that have come to light in the current crackdown include a nun from Nigeria walking to church in Texas (she was released the same day) and an Alaska state attorney from China. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Seeking to stop a “flood” of court cases freeing immigrants from mandatory detention, the Trump administration is asking an appeals court to put three immigrants back in detention.

The immigrants were freed by Texas federal judges in February and March in a case that was upheld by an appeals court panel for Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, which found that such immigrants have the right to bond hearings within 90 days of being detained. That decision was reversed by the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hold a full hearing on the case in September. 

In court papers filed earlier this month, the Trump administration noted the thousands of recent court cases, called habeas petitions, in which judges determined that the mandatory detention policy violates the U.S. constitution. In many cases, those determinations were made even by judges appointed by Trump.

“This flood of habeas petitions has inflicted a devastating toll on U.S. Attorneys’ Offices as well as district courts — draining those Offices’ resources and impeding numerous other significant priorities,” administration attorneys wrote in the filing. The administration asked for a decision by Monday, July 20, that would put the three men back into immigration detention as a precedent for other judges to follow.

Rebecca Cassler, a senior litigation attorney with the American Immigration Council, which represents the three men, told Stateline the men were all pulled over in traffic stops, have no criminal record and have children who are U.S. citizens, and have each lived in the U.S. more than 10 years. They are subject to the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy because they crossed a border illegally. 

“This is a highly irregular motion to file at this stage of the case, and it would work tremendous hardship on the clients and their families,” Cassler said. 

In immigration detention, the men “experienced rotten food, inadequate medical care, maggot- and fungus-ridden mattresses, and devastating separation from their families,” according to court papers filed Friday by the American Immigration Council. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a July 2 panel decision requiring bond hearings for immigrants held under the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy. 

For now, that means many immigration prisoners from all over the country can still be held indefinitely without bond in some of the nation’s largest detention centers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. The Trump administration policy requires detention without bond for an immigrant who crossed the border illegally, no matter how long they’ve been here. 

The appeals court will rehear the case in September.

The Trump administration policy has already been disregarded by many judges, even Trump appointees in the 5th Circuit states, who have freed immigrants or ordered bond hearings despite the policy. 

Other appeals courts have struck down the policy as unconstitutional. An exception is the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has upheld the detention policy, covering centers in seven states: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. 

Some judges in the 5th Circuit had already ordered bond hearings or releases based on the July 2 ruling. The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a related case and resolve the conflict in its next session starting in October. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

A new appeals court ruling is another blow to the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy that threatens millions of immigrants with unlimited incarceration without bond if they ever crossed a border illegally.  

A sharply divided 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on July 2 that such immigrants must receive a bond hearing within 90 days.  One of the two judges said 30 days would be a better time limit. 

The dissenting judge  said having no bond was appropriate, calling the Trump policy “constitutionally sound.” 

The 2025 policy has faced widespread rebellion among federal judges, even Trump appointees, with many of them freeing immigration prisoners and calling the policy unconstitutional. Other appeals courts have also struck it down in a conflict likely to be heard in October by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Last week’s ruling affects three of the states with some of the largest detention centers — Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Immigrants from across the county often  are transferred to those states. 

“Since ICE moves people it has detained so quickly and frequently, isolating them from their lawyers, families and support systems, many New Yorkers are held at detention centers in these states,” said Reed Dunlea, a spokesperson for the New York Immigration Coalition. 

The American Immigration Council, which was a party in the case, noted that the case turned on three longtime Texas residents with no criminal history and U.S. citizen children, all detained in traffic stops. 

The decision “affirms that constitutional rights do not disappear simply because someone is in immigration proceedings,” said Rebecca Cassier, an attorney for the council who argued in the case, in a statement.

The Department of Homeland Security, in an unattributed statement to Stateline, said it disagrees with the decision and looks forward to Supreme Court review: “DHS strongly disagrees with the Fifth Circuit panel and is confident in its legal position regarding mandatory detention.”

It’s a partial reversal of the same appeals court’s ruling in February that greenlighted limitless detention for some immigrants in those states despite conflicting rulings for other states that struck down the policy as unconstitutional. As of now only the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the detention policy, covering centers in seven states: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. 

One federal court in California struck down the mandatory detention policy nationwide in a class-action lawsuit. The ruling was stayed pending appeal in March but remains in effect in part of California and has often been cited by other state judges in freeing immigration prisoners, according to a Stateline review of recent immigration rulings. 

The immigrant detention population peaked in January at an all-time high of more than 70,000 people. It declined to about 60,000 in April as fewer non-criminal immigrants were detained in the wake of controversy and protests over enforcement in Minnesota and other places. 

There are some signs that fewer non-criminals are being detained even as arrests have surged in recent days in an attempt by the Trump administration to double the number of arrests to 2,000 a day. The share of immigration arrests that led to detention dropped from 38% last year to 17% between March and May. 

Fewer than 30% of immigrants detained in April had criminal convictions, including traffic offenses and immigration crimes. The others had only immigration violations or pending criminal charges. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.