Summary:
Federal judges ruled that hundreds of Michigan immigrants were detained without bond hearings, violating constitutional law.
The Trump administration expanded mandatory detention policies targeting immigrants without criminal records.
More than 800 habeas corpus cases were filed in Michigan federal courts since 2025, with judges granting relief in about 90% of rulings.
The Department of Justice criticized federal judges for overruling immigration judges’ bond decisions amid ongoing appeals.
Carlos Santodomingo Sánchez came to the United States in 2023 in hopes of finding safety from his homeland’s upheaval.
The ex-Venezuelan police officer and self-described “man of the law” checked in at a U.S. Consulate at the Mexico border, applied for asylum and obtained a temporary federal government designation to protect him from deportation — going on to live and work in the United States for nearly three years.
Nevertheless, late last year, the 29-year-old Ypsilanti resident landed in a Michigan immigration detention center without a bond hearing or any sense of when he might get out.
At the North Lake Processing Center, he shared a cell and toilet with a bunkmate, ate bologna and white bread for meals and occasionally heard murmurings of attempted suicides by fellow detainees. Eventually, he sued for his release in federal court.
“I cried a lot. … I felt helpless,” Santodomingo Sánchez told a Detroit Free Press reporter in Spanish in February, when he was freed from more than three months in detention. “No immigrant is prepared to be locked up,” he later added.
Santodomingo Sánchez is among thousands of immigrants across the United States and hundreds in Michigan who federal judges ruled were unconstitutionally detained without a bond hearing — meaning they were jailed in a civil court process without even a chance at release.
President Donald Trump and representatives from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have said their immigration crackdown targets “the worst of the worst” — or those who have committed serious crimes. But cases reviewed by the Free Press show many detainees had no criminal record and were already in a legal process to stay in the United States — a pattern of detainment immigration lawyers say is fueled by arrest quotas and available detention space, not just a goal to deport dangerous people.
On Wednesday, March 18, the Trump administration will argue against a judge's order freeing a Detroit father of five in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. It's one of several cases under consideration by the appeals court that could impact hundreds of detainees in Michigan, and an issue likely destined for the U.S. Supreme Court.
A Free Press review of more than 100 of these cases that began in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan gives a window into what it has taken for immigrants to get a chance at freedom most courts agree they deserve. Of 120 concluded detainee cases reviewed by the Free Press from 2025, judges ruled 89 were unlawfully denied bond hearings.
Those detained typically lacked criminal records, and dozens were — like Santodomingo Sánchez — in the midst of a legal process to determine whether they could stay in the United States, their attorneys said in court filings.
Some were picked up in metro Detroit during immigration case check-ins to comply with that process, the Free Press found, like a Cuban asylum seeker who married a U.S. citizen and was detained when the pair showed up for a scheduled visa meeting last year.
Detainees were held for a median of three months before federal judges ordered they be given bond hearings or immediately released, the review found. But bond hearings do not guarantee freedom: In Detroit and elsewhere, defense lawyers say even those granted hearings are still routinely denied bond or given prohibitively high bond amounts — keeping them behind bars.
The cruelty is the point, said Miriam Aukerman, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. The ACLU represents multiple people in detention cases all set to be heard by the federal appeals court this week.
“As a result of radical reinterpretation of the law, the government’s position is we’re going to lock them up and throw away the key. There is no way that can go home to their families,” Aukerman said in a recent phone interview.
“It is one of the largest abuses of federal power I think that one can imagine. It is depriving hundreds — eventually it could be millions — of people of their liberty for absolutely no reason.”
In a written statement, a Department of Justice spokesperson said federal judges who disagreed with immigration judges' decisions to withhold bond hearings for detainees were “throwing judicial temper-tantrums and insulting the intelligence and professionalism of our dedicated corps of with their activist rulings.”
“These federal judges simply disagree with the outcomes of the immigration judge bond decisions,” the statement said, issued without a name. “They are impugning the integrity or competence of our immigration judges solely to give them a hook to review the IJ decisions they disagree with but would otherwise be unable to directly review … they should focus on impartially interpreting immigration law to keep the American people safe.”
Bondless lockups face backlash
Federal judges across the country and in Michigan ruled in favor of at least 4,400 detainees between October 2025 and February who filed what are known as Habeas Corpus petitions. The judges determined the detainments violate a nearly 30-year-old law allowing most immigrants already in the United States to be released on bond while their cases play out in immigration court, according to reporting by Reuters.
The Trump administration widened its use of mandatory indefinite detention in July, implementing a policy that rendered any noncitizens who had arrived in the country “without inspection” eligible for it.
Before that, mandatory detention without bond was generally reserved for noncitizens who’d committed serious crimes in the United States and faced expedited deportation, and immigrants arriving at the border and awaiting judgment of whether they will be paroled into the country or sent away.
Until 2025, habeas petitions were rarely filed in Michigan’s two U.S. district courts — with no more than a handful of monthly cases in each court from 2008 to September 2025, according to an analysis by Michigan Public.
Since Trump’s January 2025 return to office and his administration’s opening of the Midwest’s largest immigrant detention facility in northern Michigan, more than 800 habeas cases have been filed in Michigan’s federal courts, according to the NPR-affiliated news outlet.
Judges sided with the detainees more than 500 times through Feb. 18, granting approximately 90% of the habeas petitions they ruled on, Michigan Public reported. The rulings to free detainees or give them bond hearings came from judges who were appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents, including Trump-appointed Western District Chief Judge Hala Y. Jarbou.
Concluded cases in which judges did not find unlawful detainment were primarily dismissed, according to the Free Press review. As of early February, just two habeas petitions originating in Detroit federal court were denied.
In granting a habeas petition for a 46-year-old Detroit man in the United States for 26 years and with three U.S. citizen children, Eastern District Judge Brandy R. McMillion wrote, “the recent shift to use the mandatory detention framework … is not only wrong but also fundamentally unfair. In a nation of laws vetted and implemented by Congress, we don’t get to arbitrarily choose which laws we feel like following when they best suit our interests.”
The Trump administration has appealed some of the rulings. It notched a victory in February when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that mandatory detention without bond is permissible for immigrants who initially entered the country without inspection, regardless of how long they’ve been in the United States.
“The statute unambiguously provides for mandatory detention,” Reagan-appointed Judge Edith H. Jones wrote in the ruling that applies to several Southern states. “The text says what it says, regardless of the decisions of prior Administrations.”
Court wins don't ensure freedom
While the federal judges’ rulings have triggered bond hearings — they do not guarantee detainees’ release.
Whether to grant bond remains the decision of immigration judges who are employees of the U.S. Department of Justice, as immigration proceedings are administrative and separate from the judicial system.
Immigrant attorneys say those Trump administration judges are now liberally labeling more people flight risks and imposing bonds so high they keep detainees behind bars.
The average 2025 bond for a Michigan immigrant detainee was $6,000, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse maintained by Syracuse University, an amount that must be paid in full. That‘s in addition to the cost of bringing a habeas petition, which can cost thousands.
Whereas past administrations used detention “to ensure people show up at their (immigration) hearings … Now you’re seeing it used as a way to deter people from continuing with their cases,” said Ruby Robinson, managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.
He added that immigration authorities are incentivized to jail as many as possible by arrest quotas and funding increases for detention facilities. News outlets have reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a goal of 3,000 arrests per day and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act set aside $38 billion to expand ICE detention capacity.
In one release petition filed in Detroit federal court, an attorney said her client — a Sterling Heights asylum seeker from Egypt — had been jailed due to available detention space.
Attorney Sara Brikho wrote in the court filing that in response to an inquiry she sent about why her client was jailed, a Department of Homeland Security member said, “‘He was taken into custody simply because we have bedspace to detain a lot of people, so we did a custody re-determination, and he will be held pending his appeal. That's it, there's nothing else,'" Brikho said the DHS employee said.
The DHS response “was deeply concerning,” Brikho wrote. "There was no allegation of misconduct, no violation, and no new development in his case.”
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson did not provide a comment.
Immigration arrests in Michigan have skyrocketed since Trump’s January 2025 return to office, from at least 970 in 2024 to at least 2,400 from January to mid-October of last year, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Free Press.
Immigrants had roots, not records
Those who federal judges deemed unlawfully detained in Michigan include a Romeo father of three with leukemia who came to the United States from Mexico nearly 20 years ago, at age 14, and struggled to get his daily cancer medication while at North Lake, court filings show.
Also unlawfully detained were a Detroit father and business owner with nine employees who came to the United States from Peru more than 20 years ago, and a Detroit father from Mexico in the United States for 15 years, whose second U.S. citizen child was born just days after he was taken into ICE custody.
Of those three, two were picked up after routine traffic stops, at least one involving local police.
People on lawful pathways to obtaining residency are increasingly being targeted, experts said, including those who fled persecution in their home countries or were victims of crimes who feared retaliation for reporting them.
“You’re seeing every day, people who are lawfully present, people who have work permits, people who are in process — who have pending cases in immigration court, pending asylum cases … or other types of relief that’s pending … those people are being detained,” said Robinson, of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.
Though they have “legal presence” in the United States, Robinson said they are “technically deportable” because they lack “legal status.”
Santodomingo Sánchez had made a case for fleeing his home country at a U.S. Consulate in Mexico in 2023, saying he was a police officer who could no longer comply with then-President Nicolás Maduro’s brutal crackdown on opponents. He was allowed into the United States to apply for asylum, given a work permit and granted what’s known as Temporary Protected Status — a designation at the time afforded to Venezuelans with their home country in the midst of political and economic crisis.
In October of last year, Santodomingo Sánchez accidentally hit a store sign while driving his roofing company’s truck in Detroit.
When police responded, he said he was so sure of his right to be in the country that he “thought everything would be fine.”
Though the Trump administration revoked TPS for many Venezuelans last year, legal challenges were still working their way through the courts and, according to court records, Santodomingo Sánchez’s asylum application remained in process.
His optimism faded when Border Patrol agents arrived.
He was detained along with a co-worker, he said, and soon after lodged at North Lake.
Policeman turned detainee
Detention upended Santodomingo Sánchez’s finances and tested his sanity, he said.
He lost his apartment when he could no longer make rent and had to stop sending money to family in Venezuela who depend on his support, he said.
In the cell next to his, he watched officers wheel away a man on a stretcher, “totally wrapped up so nobody could see.” Santodomingo Sánchez said he was unsure what happened to the man. A person, who answered the phone at North Lake Processing Center and did not give their name, refused comment.
Another detainee — a diabetic with heart problems — died in December after his medical needs went unmet, his family told a Chicago TV station. ICE has reported it as the only death at North Lake, citing suspected “natural causes.”
“Not everyone can stay calm in situations like this,” Santodomingo Sánchez said. “They don’t have the mental stability to be shut up in a place like that.”
As days turned to months, a former employer connected him with an attorney. Across the country, detainees were suing the federal government and winning release, and a Houston-based immigrant aid group agreed to help cover his legal fees.
In late January, a federal judge ruled Santodomingo Sánchez’s detention unlawful. An immigration judge ordered him released in early February without having to pay bond. He was required to wear an ankle tether. His attorney says he has no criminal history.
Santodomingo Sánchez is now working to pay off about $2,500 he still owes his lawyer, he said. With roofing work slow, he delivers food for DoorDash and has scraped together enough money to move into an apartment with roommates.
At a downtown Detroit coffee shop after an immigration office check-in in February, his head swiveled toward the sound of police sirens.
He said he still fears being suddenly taken back into custody or deported to Venezuela, where he believes he could be jailed for disobeying orders and fleeing the country.
He tries to stay positive, saying, “We’ll manage, we’ll manage something.”
But he wishes the Trump administration could see him — and the people he met at North Lake — as he sees them.
“We aren’t what you think we are — delinquents, criminals, bad people,” Santodomingo Sánchez said. “These are people who really actually came to make a better life here, to have a just and good life.”
Free Press data journalist Kristi Tanner contributed reporting.
Violet Ikonomova is an investigative reporter at the Detroit Free Press focused on government and police accountability. Contact her at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Judges: Hundreds of immigrants jailed illegally in Michigan
Reporting by Violet Ikonomova, Beki San Martin and Dave Boucher, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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