- “Habeas corpus” petitions ask judges to decide if a person is being unlawfully detained in violation of their due process rights.
- A wave of more than 800 petitions has been filed in Michigan's U.S. District Courts.
- The vast majority come from people detained at the North Lake Processing Center, a privately-run immigration detention facility in Northern Michigan.
- Michigan Public’s analysis finds judges granted most habeas petitions since January 2025 — requiring the government to give immigrants bond hearings within days or release them.
- The Trump administration says judges are going “rogue” because, it argues, the law mandates detention of any immigrant without legal status.
Fernando Ramirez Adame’s family had prepared themselves for the possibility that he would be picked up by immigration authorities. If it happened, they agreed he’d voluntarily deport himself.
“Our plan was, if you get got, you're going (back) to Mexico. You're not going to spend any time in (detention) because it's not safe for him with his diabetes,” Adame’s daughter, Samantha Ramirez, said.
Adame has worked as a truck driver. Ramirez said he has a valid work permit through 2028. He was picked up at a weigh station in Indiana last September. Today he lives in Fremont, Michigan, less than an hour away from the big new immigration detention center in Northern Michigan where he was held.
When Adame was first detained, his family traveled to a court in Detroit to begin their father’s voluntary deportation process. His daughter, Samantha, said she didn’t want him spending any time locked up, even though returning to Mexico after more than 30 years away meant restarting somewhere he no longer had any connections to.
He even signed up at the detention center to get the voluntary deportation form,” she said. “And he never got it.”
Instead, Adame was detained for three months without a bond hearing at the North Lake Processing Center.
He got out in January, after a Republican-appointed judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan granted his habeas petition.
Since it reopened as an immigration detention center last summer, North Lake has detained thousands of people arrested in an unprecedented deportation campaign.
As the population in the privately-run detention center in Baldwin began to near 1,000 people in September, petitions started to show up in Michigan’s federal district courts.
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Habeas corpus petitions are civil lawsuits that allow people to argue they’re being unlawfully detained by the government, in violation of their Fifth Amendment due process rights. When a judge grants a habeas petition, the government must either give the petitioner a bond hearing or release them within a few days.
Before 2025, immigration-related habeas petitions were rarely filed in U.S. District Courts in Michigan. Neither district saw more than five cases in a single month between 2008 and September 2025.
“I had never had to file these in immigration detention cases in my 20-plus years practicing law,” said Grand Rapids-based attorney Robert Alvarez. “In the last few months since we started filing these, we have now filed about five dozen petitions.”
People who file these lawsuits are not guaranteed a lawyer.
Alvarez said his firm and other attorneys have been doing these cases “low-bono,” meaning at a discounted cost, “just to try and help people out” and “push back on this administration.” Plus, he said, attorney fees can get covered by the government after winning a case.
“Mandatory detention”
In July, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told agents that, effective immediately, anyone who arrived in the country illegally could be subject to mandatory detention, "ineligible" for a bond hearing, and “may not be released” for however long it takes for their deportation case to play out.
The federal government has long applied these rules to people “seeking admission” at the border, including people who are caught crossing illegally.
In those cases “the law says, ‘well, until we decide that you should be admitted, we're going to detain you.’ And you don't have any options,” said Andrew Moore, a law professor at the University of Detroit Mercy.
But historically, Moore said, the law guaranteed people who were already in the country the same due process rights that citizens get under the constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
“And the question essentially is,” he said, “do you treat those people the same way you treat somebody who's just arriving and at the border?”
Michigan’s federal judges have answered that question repeatedly. Overwhelmingly, they say the Trump administration’s new interpretation of the law is incorrect.
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For immigrants without legal status who are detained as the government works to deport them, one of the first due process steps has long been a bond hearing before an immigration judge. That judge can decide whether to allow the person to go free as their case unfolds (the median bond in December 2025 was $4,000) or keep them in detention.
In an August habeas petition ruling, Eastern District Judge Brandy R. McMillion wrote “the recent shift to use the mandatory detention framework … is not only wrong but also fundamentally unfair. In a nation of laws vetted and implemented by Congress, we don’t get to arbitrarily choose which laws we feel like following when they best suit our interests.”
That ruling freed Juan Manuel Lopez-Campos, a 46-year-old Mexican father of five U.S. citizen children, from a nearly two-month-long detention at the Monroe County Jail. It is one of four county jails in the state that hold immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Lopez-Campos, like many petitioners in cases reviewed by Michigan Public, had no criminal record. Also like many, he was turned over to immigration authorities after a local traffic stop. The Romulus Police Department pulled him over “for allegedly passing a vehicle improperly," McMillion said.
The ACLU’s Miriam Aukerman represented Lopez-Campos and called the shift to mandatory detention “a huge abuse of federal power.”
“It's going to result in the needless detention of probably millions of people,” she said. The federal government has appealed the Lopez-Campos case in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over cases in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE did not respond to an interview request. DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) did provide emailed statements calling judges who grant petitions “rogue” and “activists.”
But data show the party affiliations didn’t affect how federal judges in the Western District of Michigan, where the bulk of the caseload is, ruled.
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“After four years of de facto amnesty under the previous administration, the Trump Administration is complying with court orders and fully enforcing federal immigration law,” a DOJ spokesperson wrote in response to detailed questions. “If rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating cases and respected the Government’s obligation to properly prepare cases, there wouldn’t be an ‘overwhelming’ habeas caseload or concern over DHS following orders,” the statement said in part.
What happens next?
The dispute is likely bound for the U.S. Supreme Court. Last month, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, ruled in the Trump administration's favor, saying detaining immigrants without bond is legal. The opinion isn’t binding in cases outside of the 5th Circuit, including Michigan cases.
“The government is just trying to strip due process and create this deportation machine where nobody has any rights,” said Amy Maldonado, an East Lansing attorney who said she has represented people in over 30 habeas petitions.
However, Maldonado and other attorneys told Michigan Public they’re confident that other appeals courts will rule against interpreting the law to allow these mandatory detentions.
Habeas is not a guarantee of freedom
Michigan Public reviewed dozens of case files for petitions granted by a judge in the Western District of Michigan this year. Court documents show that while many people were released or granted bond, many were also denied bond after being labeled a “flight risk.”
Maldonado said that until recently, winning a habeas case almost guaranteed her clients would be released, with or without a bond hearing before an immigration judge. Immigration judges are appointed by the DOJ and are not actually part of the judicial branch of government.
“There's information circulating through the private bar for immigration attorneys that immigration judges have been instructed verbally … to find a basis to deny bond based on flight risk,” she said. “And since that time, all of the habeas petitions I have won have been denied [bond] based on flight risk.”
But a DOJ spokesperson denied that. “Those allegations are unprofessional at best and unethical at worst, as it impugns the integrity of judges with no basis in fact,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement.
For immigrants who have been denied a bond hearing after being granted their habeas corpus petition, there is little they can do.
Back in February, a West Michigan judge granted Dalveilys Pineda’s habeas petition, after nearly four months in detention at North Lake. Despite having a pending asylum case, a work permit, and family in Chicago, an immigration judge considered her a flight risk and not eligible for bond.
“I don't understand why because I have never been charged with a crime, and there’s nothing on my record,” Pineda said in an interview with Michigan Public. “The judge said it was because of the number of family members I have [in the U.S.], but it just felt like an excuse to keep me here.”
Seeking asylum from her home country in Venezuela, Pineda immigrated to the United States in 2023 with her husband and her 3-year-old daughter.
Pineda was working as a grocery delivery driver in October when she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Walmart parking lot.
She is still being detained at North Lake.
Michigan Public’s Dustin Dwyer and Beenish Ahmed contributed to this story.
