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Illegal immigrants have found a new way to get released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, throwing a massive wrench into the Trump administration\u2019s deportation plan.<\/p>\n
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, illegal immigrants have filed more than 18,000 habeas petitions challenging their detention in federal courts, ProPublica reported<\/a> last month. It\u2019s more than the number of such challenges filed over the last three administrations put together.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a perfect storm,\u201d Scott Mechkowski, former ICE deputy field office director in New York, told The Daily Wire. \u201cYou have increased enforcement, increased mandatory detention, and an increased perception of judicial bias that\u2019s driving the habeas rates out the window.\u201d<\/p>\n In Arizona, United States Attorney Timothy Courchaine said his office went from receiving 10 habeas petitions in immigration cases to \u201cnearly a thousand\u201d since Trump returned to the White House. Border states like Arizona are inundated right now because they have a larger share of illegal immigrants in ICE detention.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is definitely a new trend \u2026 Now, those aren\u2019t all just the bond hearings, but that\u2019s the vast, vast, vast majority,\u201d Courchaine told The Daily Wire.<\/p>\n \u201cIn most of them, they are [granting bond] \u2026 so we\u2019ve been losing almost all of these and the folks will be released,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n The habeas petitions move detainees\u2019 cases out of the immigration court system and into the district court docket, where judges have \u201ca lot more remedies to give them than an immigration judge,\u201d Courchaine said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey can get a whole lot more relief than they would ever be due in immigration court,\u201d he said, adding that \u201cdistrict court judges \u2026 have their own ways of running their courts, and they can issue their own orders.\u201d<\/p>\n Mechkowski described district courts as \u201cfavorable\u201d venues for illegal immigrants \u201cbecause \u2026 they don\u2019t necessarily understand immigration law.\u201d<\/p>\n It also buys illegal immigrants more time in the United States, according to Mechkowski.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a detained hearing, you usually get a hearing within a month or two and in a non-detained setting in New York, we were scheduling hearings out four years. So that\u2019s why they fight tooth and nail to get out of a detained docket and to get on a non-detained docket because it buys them years of time before their hearing comes up,\u201d Mechkowski said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd in those years, you can accrue all kinds of equities that influence your court proceedings,\u201d he continued. \u201cYou can have kids, you can clean your record \u2026 you can put four years between you and a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n Dallas-based attorney Dan Gividen has shifted his practice from fighting removal cases before immigration judges to solely arguing for his clients\u2019 release in district courts.<\/p>\n Roughly 40% of new habeas cases are being filed in Texas, according<\/a> to ProPublica.<\/p>\n Since Gividen began his practice in 2019, he had roughly \u201cthree or four\u201d habeas cases, he told The Daily Wire. Since July, he\u2019s had \u201cclose to 100.\u201d<\/p>\n Gividen said the tactic \u201chas been absolutely successful\u201d in freeing his clients from ICE detention centers \u201cparticularly in places like the Western District of Texas, the Southern District of Texas \u2026 in Oklahoma and New Mexico, Colorado.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re having constant success in those cases. It\u2019s literally the only way to get someone out of ICE detention it feels like these days,\u201d Gividen, who previously served as ICE\u2019s assistant chief counsel, said.<\/p>\n Immigration lawyers often file habeas petitions after it becomes clear their clients either have no chance of getting bond from immigration judges or have been denied a bond already.<\/p>\n In doing so, they\u2019re taking \u201ctwo bites of the apple,\u201d Mechkowski said, adding \u201cbecause you essentially have the immigration judges already rendered that that person\u2019s on bond eligible or not going to give them a bond.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd so it gives them a second bite to ask a different judicial body to release them,\u201d he said, adding that he\u2019s often fighting for the release of his clients who are \u201cnot a danger\u201d or \u201cflight risk,\u201d but who nevertheless don\u2019t have \u201ca snowball\u2019s chance in hell\u201d to make bond.<\/p>\n Gividen said there was one federal judge who did not grant their habeas petitions, so he has looked to other jurisdictions to fight for his clients\u2019 release.<\/p>\n Mechkowski said the\u201dforum shop\u201d is all too common in such cases.<\/p>\n Courchaine described the surge in habeas petitions as a \u201csystemic burden\u201d on his office, which has been forced to divert criminal prosecutors to work habeas immigration cases.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had to pull criminal prosecutors off of their caseloads and put them into civil [cases]. We\u2019ve had to shift around criminal prosecutors\u2019 workloads and investigations, so they could take this on. Even my criminal chief, who\u2019s in charge of more than 60 federal prosecutors up in Phoenix, Arizona, has had to volunteer to take cases,\u201d Courchaine said.<\/p>\n