Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to dig into the secret case files of dozens of illegal alien habeas corpus cases filed in federal district court in Minnesota. The hidden files reveal a judicial system far more broken than you can imagine.
The habeas corpus petitions are filed as civil cases on behalf of illegal aliens who are being held in ICE custody in anticipation of their upcoming deportation. The number of cases filed skyrocketed during Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. The filing pace has dropped off (but not stopped) since the surge wound down.
So far in 2026, nearly 1,300 habeas cases have been filed in Minnesota. Most of these cases include noncitizens from Mexico and Central and South America. There are some from southeast Asia and more from Africa (both east and west). A tiny handful hail from eastern Europe.
From that number we’ve had a handful of repeat customers, whose original petitions were denied or who have been re-detained after being released.
Until late March, these petitions were nearly always successful in gaining the release of the detained alien. But then on March 25, the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the applicable law reads “shall be detained” and that the law really does indeed apply.
As I’ve documented during the past two months, a few local judges have followed the law, but the majority of district court judges have invented ways to circumvent the 8th Circuit. In any event, the success rate has dropped considerably, but not down to zero.
As I’ve repeated many times, nearly all of the documents within each habeas case file cannot be accessed via the internet. Outside observers can see that a case has been opened and see the end result (should one be reached), but the initial petition and intermediate filings are locked behind a wall.
These filings can be viewed by the public while inside the local courthouse itself, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks. And as I said above, it’s worse than you thought.
We had one case where the alien had already been deported to Nicaragua weeks before, but a lawyer was trying to force the government to find him and bring him back.
In a more bizarre instance, we have an illegal alien wanted on criminal charges for illegal immigration (yes, that is a federal crime) down in Texas but also the subject of a habeas petition filed in Minnesota. The judge in the habeas case ruled that the alien cannot be sent out of state, and his colleague in the criminal case ruled that the alien must be extradited to Texas. The government can only comply with one order and must disobey the other. How to choose?
The habeas petitions themselves can vary from less than 10 to more than 50 pages of text. The longer versions include all the usual legal boilerplate, but also page after page of ritual denunciations of President Trump, national immigration policy, and Operation Metro Surge. The denunciations are included even in cases that originated long before Pres. Trump’s first term. The ratio turns out to be roughly 95 percent appeal to emotion/ideology, and 5 percent law/facts/logic. Sadly, this combination works about half the time, and all of the time for some Democratic-appointed judges.
The petitions are long on praise for the alien, but short on relevant details of any category. In general, there are many accusations made against ICE, but little or no evidence presented. A few petitions manage to fail to include any mention of the violent, criminal felony history of the subject, even when it forms the basis for the underlying deportation proceeding. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know when strategic omissions of key facts shade into outright misrepresentations.
Reading the responses filed by the government, you’d think that you were reading about an entirely different person. You get to hear for the first time about the past criminal cases, the felony convictions, the previous deportations, the sham marriage. You read about failures to appear and final orders of deportation. Devoted family men turn out to be serial domestic abusers, etc., etc. In fact, nearly all recent detainees came to ICE’s attention as the result of a recent state-level criminal arrest.
Here are some notes from a recent batch of habeas cases I reviewed, with the case number, nationality, and telling detail: #2798 Cuba multiple felony convictions, #2802 Mexico theft, #2807 Mexico aggravated felony, #2850 Ecuador DUI, #2853, Guatemala failure to appear. You get the idea.
My favorite case from this batch (#2794) involves a Mauritanian, who while appealing his deportation order left for Canada and got caught sneaking back in (again), and wants a do-over.
What I have not seen is a single instance of where ICE has detained an actual U.S. citizen. In those instances where it’s alleged that the alien is a bona fide permanent resident or otherwise enjoys legal status, it turns out that the status was revoked, or the visa has expired.
I feel confident in claiming that there is not a single instance among the 1,300 habeas cases filed where the petitioner is not an illegal alien. In every case, the argument is for judicial forbearance or at least having more due process take place before the inevitable occurs. It’s a game of delay, delay, delay, hoping to outlast the Trump Administration.
Enough, already.
[Note: an earlier version of this post appeared at AmericanExperiment.Org.]
