Are Trump's Immigration Orders Legal? Administration Faces Rise In Federal Immigration Lawsuits

President Donald Trump’s administration may be ramping up deportations of previously protected undocumented immigrants, but many of the people targeted by his Jan. 25 executive order on immigration have taken the fight to federal courts, new data show.

The number of civil lawsuits filed in federal courts in March rose by more than 40 percent over the same month last year, to 318 cases, according to a Monday report from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a data research organization at Syracuse University. That’s a nearly 6 percent rise over February, and more than double the March total in 2012.

Of the 763 total civil immigration suits filed in federal courts for the period between Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration and the end of March, close to half of them were filed by people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement seeking their own release, a court order preventing their deportation or both.

Nearly one in five were filed in New York’s Eastern District, or Brooklyn; 12 percent were filed in the nearby New Jersey federal district and one in 10 cases was filed in New York’s Southern District of Manhattan. Together with California’s Central District, or Los Angeles, which handled nearly as many as Manhattan, those courts accounted for half of the federal immigration dispute suits filed since Trump took office, according to TRAC.

Trump’s administration has been somewhat unclear in terms of which undocumented people it would be targeting — namely, convicted criminals, those brought into the country as children, all unauthorized immigrants or some combination of those groups. But while immigration arrests jumped by nearly a third in the weeks after Trump took office, the Washington Post recently reported, deportations fell 1.2 percent in the first quarter of the year compared to the same three months in 2016.

Bill Stock, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the slight drop in deportations likely had more to do with the fewer numbers of immigrants attempting to cross the border than the legal battles playing out in district courts.

“The number of people being apprehended on the basis of old orders is up,” Stock said, pointing out that the most frequent legal action mentioned in the TRAC report was a habeas action, meaning immigrants had predominantly sued to halt their immediate deportations — many of which had been federally mandated for decades, but hardly enforced. “They said, ‘Ah, I guess we’re supposed to execute these apprehension orders now.’”

Stock mentioned one client who had come to the U.S. from Honduras as a teenager and brushed off a court summons at the time, partly because he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. Now a restaurant owner with an American wife and child, he’s facing a legal predicament.

“This American child has to grow up without a father?” Stock said. “It's like, ‘Well, that’s what happens.’”

That stricter enforcement could be at the root of what ICE described as “overwhelming caseloads” in a recent internal report. The agency’s study of its procedures, released April 13, attributed its inability “to keep up with growing numbers of deportable aliens” to insufficient training, outdated procedures and a lack of data for the sudden influx of cases. That overload could continue to plague ICE, and the number of lawsuits will likely keep rising, as the agency turns from “the easiest cases,” such as people who’ve recently crossed the border, to more well-established non-citizens, Stock said, in the near future.