Michigan Public began collecting data on bond hearing outcomes following granted habeas petitions in late February, in the process of reporting a previous story: "Judges rule hundreds of immigrants “unlawfully detained” at ICE center in Northern Michigan."
The purpose was to verify whether there was any truth to claims that immigration judges were denying bond to people who were granted habeas at higher rates starting in mid January.
Reporters chose to focus on petitions that were granted on or before Feb 18, 2026 because Michigan Public had an existing data set of granted petitions up to that date.
Information about bond outcomes is contained in “status reports” that federal judges require the U.S. Department of Justice to file after granting a habeas petition.
Status reports are not publicly accessible online, which is the case for most court documents associated with habeas cases (excluding judges rulings).
In order to collect data from these reports, Michigan Public reporter Dustin Dwyer spent several days reviewing these reports at the document kiosk inside the Western District Court in Grand Rapids. The court does not allow electronic devices in the records area, so Dwyer hand wrote information from the reports and attached bond orders on a printed spreadsheet.
Reporter Adam Yahya Rayes also collected data this way for cases granted in the Eastern District Court and a small number of cases in the Western District.
All reports associated with cases granted in the Western District from January-February 18, 2026 were collected this way.
The majority of status reports for cases granted in the Western District in November and December 2025 were provided to Michigan Public by the ACLU of Michigan. Dwyer collected data on 50 additional status reports that were not included in documents shared with Michigan Public by the ACLU.
Rayes used regex and the pdfplumber Python library to extract text from the ACLU documents, before manually reviewing all the extracted text to quickly create structured data.
Status reports from December and November mostly did not include attached bond orders or information about bond amounts. This limited Michigan Public's ability to review grant or denial rates by individual immigration judges or the dollar amounts for granted bonds in that time period.
