ICE Keeps Snatching Immigrants Who Just Won Release in Court

Immigrants who beat the government in court are getting snatched right back up. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is re-arresting people who won habeas corpus petitions and walked free, according to The Guardian, which identified at least 20 such cases nationwide over the last year through court records, attorneys and media reports. In one case, a 77-year-old Palestinian man was picked up again within 10 days of his release. In Minnesota, seven immigrants were re-detained before they even made it out of the Whipple federal building near Minneapolis, as first reported by MPR.

The habeas petitions keep piling up anyway. Research by ProPublica found immigrants have filed more than 91,000 of them, a number that has climbed so fast that filings since 25 January outpace the past three presidential administrations combined, including Trump's first term. A habeas petition — Latin for 'you shall have a body' — challenges the government's right to hold someone while their main legal case plays out. Winning one used to mean walking out the door. Now it often just means a shorter stay inside.

'We've seen a very, very sharp increase in people who are released on habeas petitions, only to be very rapidly re-detained, often in violation of the federal court's order,' Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, told The Guardian. One of her clients, 77-year-old Akram Mahmoud Omar, suffered a heart attack while detained at ICE's 'Camp 57' facility inside Louisiana's Angola prison, then got arrested again by ICE within days of his release on a habeas petition, the Intercept first reported.

Judges are starting to push back. In October, the 10th US circuit court of appeals in Colorado refused the government's bid to toss a habeas petition on the grounds that it could simply re-detain the petitioner, noting a prior 'demonstrated pattern of re-detaining' people granted habeas relief. In Louisiana, a federal judge held a senior immigration official in contempt for violating orders and demanded the release of Ibrahim Mohammed, Pranzatelli's client who had already been re-arrested three times, the Banner first reported. Judges in Pennsylvania and Minnesota have also held authorities in contempt or threatened to.

Attorneys tie the re-detentions to the Trump administration's growing push to deport people to third countries. Susanna Booth, a senior attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights in Washington DC, said the surge is 'really tethered to the explosion of third country agreements with primarily African nations in the past four months.' More than 25,000 non-citizens have been shipped to countries that aren't their own, where they often have no ties, and are frequently locked up or pressured to return home — a practice human rights experts say violates the Convention Against Torture.

The courts have been mixed. In September, an appeals court said the administration had to give notice of third-country deportations and let immigrants contest them, but the supreme court's six-justice conservative majority granted an emergency stay soon after, letting removals continue without explanation. Some detainees have caught a break: a court overruled a Biden-era policy that blocked most people who crossed the border unlawfully from getting asylum. Louisiana attorney Joseph Giardina had two Egyptian clients protected under withholding of removal who were re-detained, threatened with deportation — then granted asylum. 'They are doing their damnedest to deport them as quickly as they possibly can to another country,' he said. For attorneys, the wins feel temporary. 'We can sort of win the battle, but we're going to lose the war,' said Jonah Eaton, a litigation attorney at UnLocal who has filed habeas suits for detainees. 'In the long run, they're still going to be able to do what they want to do, which is arrest people and hold them for long periods of time.'