Detention without Due Process

In July 2025, the Trump administration reinterpreted a 30-year-old immigration law and began enforcing the mandatory detention of immigrants targeted for deportation.

Included in this new directive were immigrants who had lived in the United States for decades and those who had government permission to remain in the country while their immigration cases were pending. As a result, many became ineligible for the bond hearings that had long been routinely available to them in immigration court.

Suddenly, those with no criminal history and who did not pose a flight risk were uprooted from their families and stuck in detention, with little chance of obtaining release on bond or even receiving a bond hearing in immigration court.

Detainees and their attorneys turned to federal court instead, invoking their constitutional right of habeas corpus, which guarantees every person within the United States—regardless of their immigration status—the opportunity to challenge the legality of their detention before a judge.

Since January 2025, there have been 57,657 habeas cases filed in federal courts.

Ramiro was one of them. This is his story.

500 miles from home

In January 2025, Kentucky had one ICE detention facility. Today, there are eight.

Katie Taylor, legal director for Neighbors Immigration Clinic, our ILJ affiliate serving Kentucky, sees clients in all of them. NIC is the only nonprofit taking on bond and habeas cases in the entire state.

Most of the detainees Katie consults with aren’t from Kentucky or even the surrounding region. They were swept up in the high-profile immigration enforcement operations that dominated headlines over the past year in places like Chicago, New York City, Minneapolis, and California.

Ramiro lives in Chicago with his partner, Luci, and their two daughters. As an asylum seeker with humanitarian parole, he came to his local ICE office for his routine check-in. There he was immediately handcuffed, arrested, and transported 500 miles away to a remote detention center in Kentucky—far from his support system of family, church, and community and with no access to legal counsel.

Katie’s name is on an American Immigration Lawyers Association referral list, and word has spread throughout immigrant communities that NIC is willing to take detention cases.

Luci contacted NIC with an urgent plea for help for Ramiro. She was not the only one Katie heard from that week.

“We receive 10 or 12 calls each day from family members with detained loved ones in Kentucky,” Katie says. “And we get a ton of requests from attorneys in other states looking for help for their clients.”

At any given time, Katie manages a half-dozen habeas cases and takes on a new one every week. She immediately recognized the strengths in Ramiro’s case. His two-year parole had not yet expired, nor had it been formally revoked. His detention had been unlawful, and Katie could file a habeas petition to prove it.

It’s important to understand that federal courts are not the usual sphere of immigration attorneys. Their work is exclusively limited to immigration court. When Katie decided to take on habeas cases, she first had to be admitted to both the Eastern and Western U.S. District Courts in Kentucky—since the state’s eight detention centers span both districts. Only then would she be permitted to argue Ramiro’s case before a federal judge.

“There were six government attorneys on the other side,” she recalls. “And then there was me. I wrote a 20-page appeal on why Ramiro’s detention was illegal. The six attorneys responded with an 88-page packet.”

Ramiro—and Katie—prevailed. The judge ordered the government to either release Ramiro or ensure the immigration judge gave him a bond hearing. Two months later, the bond was finally set for $1,500. Members of Ramiro’s church in Chicago immediately launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise the funds to bring him home.

Several of our sites are now pursuing habeas petitions on behalf of their detained clients, but few have championed this work as passionately as Katie.

As one of four ILJ Network consulting attorneys, she strongly encourages more attorneys to gain admission to their own federal district courts—not only to file habeas petitions, but also to hold the government accountable for other unlawful actions.

“There’s so much of what the government is doing right now that is illegal or arguably illegal,” Katie states emphatically. “And the only way to fight back at this point is to be able to sue them in federal court.”

Epilogue: The kindness of strangers

With the money for the bond raised, the discussion now turned to how to pay it safely. Online payment was simpler, but susceptible to glitches and delays. They would need to pay it in person, but Ramiro was adamant that Luci should not go near any government office. It was much too dangerous.

“If it’s a choice between her and me, I choose her,” Ramiro told them.

The church found a U.S. citizen volunteer to deliver the payment instead.

ICE released Ramiro on a random street outside the detention center. He was still far from home. He still had his asylum case, with an uncertain outcome at the end of it. The government still wanted very much to deport him. But for now, he was free of that terrible place.

NIC connected Ramiro with a volunteer network that helps recently released detainees make the journey home. Volunteers picked him up and drove him to a safe house, where he took a long, hot shower and ate a decent meal. Traveling by airline was out of the question, of course, so they loaded him up with gift cards for the family and drove him another three and a half hours to Indianapolis. Then he boarded the bus for Chicago.

For two months, Ramiro had spent most of his waking hours—and many of the sleeping ones, too—worrying about Luci and his two little girls. That ICE would also arrest and detain her. That they would take the girls and send them to some cold and scary place in the middle of nowhere. That he wouldn’t be able to find them, and that they would be separated for a long, long time.

And now the family is together again. Ramiro is home at last.