![An editorial collage combining a black-and-white photograph of the Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building, home to the Detroit Immigration Court, with colorful torn-paper fragments of text clipped from immigration court bond hearing documents. The scraps — in pink, blue, and green — display partial phrases including "Granted" (with a checked checkbox), "Denied" (with a checked checkbox), "a flight risk," "Respondent is a flight risk," "the Immigration Judge denied Pe[titioner]," "(ICE), released Petit[ioner]," "under bond of $5,000," "bond of $15,000, with," and "Denied, because." The overlapping fragments visually contrast bond grants and denials, evoking the bureaucratic and high-stakes nature of immigration detention proceedings.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4371db5/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1920x1080+0+0/resize/840x472!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F75%2F7b%2Fa875b7d043b4b67d5862f5501af5%2Fbond-headers-5.png)
- Many people locked up during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown have found a path to freedom by filing habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. For the most part, federal judges in Michigan have granted those petitions, requiring the government to give people bond hearings or release them.
- Hundreds locked up in Michigan were granted bond in immigration court, according to a Michigan Public analysis of outcomes for about 500 cases. However, bond denials increased sharply starting in mid-January.
- Court records reviewed by Michigan Public could not provide any single explanation for the apparent increase, although some believe immigration judges are being pressured to deny bond to people who were granted habeas.
- The Department of Justice (DOJ), which oversees immigration courts, did not respond to questions for this story.
For many immigrants detained in Michigan, getting an immigration judge to grant bond is one of a few ways to get released. It doesn’t take long for word to spread when someone locked up in the North Lake Processing Center gets denied bond.
“It’s been a massive denial (of bond hearings),” said Luis Fernandez-Escalante, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who has spent nearly six months in the massive northern Michigan facility. “One day I witnessed at least ten people get denied a bond, one after the other.”
Several people detained inside North Lake, and some of their lawyers outside, are concerned the narrow path to freedom they thought they had through habeas corpus is closing.
Throughout the end of 2025, “we tended to see pretty reasonable bond outcomes for individuals who were granted habeas,” said Ruby Robinson, a senior managing attorney with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC).
But, Robinson and other attorneys said, it seemed bond hearings were “almost being pre-ordained to be denied” earlier this year. Now, “when a bond is approved, I think that's an exciting moment,” he said.
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“Obviously a lot of what's going on is in the hopes that people will just give up and self-deport. And I hate to say that,” said Lawrence Burman, a self-described Republican and immigration judge who retired in December after nearly three decades on the bench. “There's never been anything like what's been going on in this administration.”
The Department of Justice, which oversees immigration courts and appoints immigration judges, did not respond to an interview request or written questions for this story.
As the Trump administration ramped up immigration enforcement, it initiated a broad "mandatory detention” policy, a shift that led to thousands of immigrants being held without a bond hearing. Lawyers challenged the policy through a flood of habeas corpus petitions.
Michigan Public tracked more than 800 such petitions filed in Michigan’s two federal district courts. In most cases, judges found immigrants were being “unlawfully detained” in violation of their Fifth Amendment due process rights.
But “winning” a habeas case does not guarantee freedom. The judge’s order gives the government a few business days to either release detainees or give them a bond hearing. And it requires the DOJ to file a “status report” detailing what happened.
Michigan Public reviewed status reports from about 500 cases where habeas petitions were granted in Michigan from November 2025 to mid-February 2026.
Data from those status reports provides a rare, if incomplete, window into what happens after federal judges decide immigrants are “unlawfully” detained at North Lake and four county jails that work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“This data allowed us to see the actual trend and that it wasn't just a figment of our imagination,” said MIRC attorney Robinson of the analysis. “It wasn't just a pessimistic [view of] reality.”
Dozens of immigrants detained in the state were released after filing petitions in federal courts. About 200 more were granted bonds, giving them a chance at freedom — if they can afford it.
But many people, like Luis Fernandez-Escalante, were denied bond and remained detained.
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Luis Fernandez-Escalante felt a glimmer of hope when he learned that a federal judge had granted him a bond hearing.
It was early February, and he could feel cold wind seeping through the small windows in his cell block, made worse by the inadequate heat coming from the facility’s furnace.
All 40-year-old Fernandez-Escalante could think about was his wife, Filomena, his young daughter, his two little cats back home in Chicago and the possibility that they might not be apart for much longer.
Six days later the bond hearing came. Immigration Judge Ellen Karesh ruled him a “flight risk,” noting his family didn’t own property and had “minimal contacts” in the U.S.
“I don't understand….since 2023, my wife and I have been working and going to school to study English and we’ve never missed an immigration check-in appointment,” he said.
That month at least 100 immigrants detained in Michigan who were granted habeas petitions were denied bond, many for similar reasons.
“Denied, because flight risk”
Immigration attorneys and former immigration judges who spoke to Michigan Public said they fear current immigration judges are no longer giving detainees a fair shot in bond hearings.
“There's certainly been rumors amongst immigration attorneys, and these are substantiated by affidavits by former immigration judges, that there were instructions to judges to deny bonds based on flight risk if they were habeas cases,” said Daniel Caudillo, a former immigration judge who directs the Immigration Law Clinic at Texas Tech.
“I certainly know of at least one recently terminated former immigration judge who has provided a sworn affidavit,” he added. Caudillo was “not at liberty” to share the affidavit he mentioned and Michigan Public was unable to independently locate it.
George Pappas, a former immigration court judge in Massachusetts who was fired by the Trump administration in 2025, said detainees were routinely released in the past.
“Obviously if the individual has a prior criminal record, they are not going to get a bond,” Pappas said. “But if a person does not have a criminal record, has been paying taxes, raising a family, and their only civil violation is entering the country let’s say without a visa, they’re a high candidate for bond.”
Most court documents Michigan Public reviewed had almost no details about why a detainee was granted bond or why that bond was set at a certain amount. Bond denials often contained some information — a few paragraphs at most. In some cases, judges cited criminal charges or encounters with law enforcement.
But in several denials, immigration judges only wrote “flight risk”.
“If you’re going to issue an order as an immigration judge, you’re obligated to explain the legal reasoning why the person is a flight risk,” said Pappas, who is critical of the Trump administration and now represents immigrants. To him, Pappas said, the lack of information in some orders shows immigration judges are “rubber stamping denials.”
The sheer volume of cases could be part of what’s behind short denial explanations, said Caudillo.
“I think the increased number of detention has certainly permitted judges to not be as thorough in their decision-making,” Caudillo said.
But, he said, the orders Michigan Public viewed are “summary orders.” It’s likely judges would be able to provide more detailed reasonings in response to an appeal.
Caudillo said it would be “foolish” for judges to issue two-word denials in bond hearings ordered by federal courts because the people in those hearings have already shown they’re willing “to go to federal court in order to obtain due process.”
A “second round” in federal court
Across the country, some sitting federal judges have also expressed doubts.
“The bond hearing has indications of predetermined outcome,” wrote Western District of Missouri Judge Douglas Harpool in an order overturning a $20,000 bond in February. Harpool called the immigration judge’s decision that the woman was a flight risk “clearly untethered by the facts and any logical conclusion,” noting she hadn’t missed a hearing date and had a family in the country.
The order was previously reported by Politico, which found a number of similar cases.
In another order, a West Virginia federal judge pointed to an affidavit by a former ICE attorney who said “bond hearings are now being systematically denied bond based on rationales that would not have been deemed sufficient weeks earlier” in an apparent “effort to nullify the constitutional protections that federal courts have recognized and enforced through habeas corpus.”
In Michigan, attorneys have challenged some high bond amounts or denials in what they call “second round habeas” petitions. A few have been successful.
In one case, Michigan Western District Judge Jane M. Beckering ordered the immigration court to redo a bond hearing because the immigration judge required Juan Jose Soto-Medina, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, to prove that he was not a flight risk.
Instead, Beckering wrote, “due process requires the government to bear the burden of demonstrating that [Soto-Medina] is a flight risk or danger to the community to deny bond … a majority of federal courts, including both trial and appellate courts, have taken this position.”
Soto-Medina was granted bond the second time around and now the DOJ is appealing his habeas case to the Sixth Circuit Court.
The language in many bond denials reviewed by Michigan Public argue detainees have to prove they shouldn’t be detained, rather than the government. This is partly based on a 2006 precedent set by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which Beckering rejected. Like immigration courts and immigration judges, the BIA is part of the Department of Justice.
“This Court is not bound by or required to give deference to an agency interpretation of a statute,” Beckering wrote.
The Western District Federal Court has a standing “administrative order” that puts Beckering, appointed by former President Joe Biden, in charge of ruling on any habeas petition where the “burden of proof” in a bond hearing is the main issue. The order was signed by the court’s chief justice, a President Donald Trump appointee.
Beckering approved some requests for renewed bond hearings – citing her own reasoning in the Soto-Medina case.
She also rejected some cases where she found that detainees’ due process rights were not violated in the bond hearing.
“A not so subtle pressure”
A number of attorneys who spoke to Michigan Public said they believed judges in Detroit’s immigration court are denying bond, or setting a high bond, in cases that historically would have been easily granted for lower costs. Some see it as evidence of a policy within the court.
Court records reviewed by Michigan Public couldn’t provide a single explanation for increasing bond denials.
“Immigration judges are ultimately employees of the executive and so they work under the Department of Justice and ultimately the attorney general,” said Daniel Caudillo, the former immigration judge and Texas Tech Immigration Law Clinic director. “And the administration made it very clear what they want the courts to be. I think the advertising now is for deportation judges, not immigration judges.”
While that may support the “illusion” that there is some internal guidance to broadly deny bond, Caudillo said he still has “a lot of faith” that his former colleagues on the bench “very carefully apply the law” and that some will resist any "encroachment" on their independence.
“I don’t think they would ever issue something that obviously says ‘You will rule this way or that way,” said Lawrence Burman, who served as an immigration judge across three states for more than 27 years before retiring at the end of last year. “There are obviously subtle ways they can communicate that, such as firing people who don’t do what they like.”
NPR found the administration fired nearly 100 immigration judges last year.
“That’s a not so subtle pressure,” Burman said.
