Why federal courts are at a breaking point over Trump’s mass deportation surge

President Donald Trump’s administration is working fast to arrest and deport as many people as it can, from street-level surges of federal officers to far-reaching behind-the-scenes changes that have upended immigration policy altogether.

But a government lawyer’s breakdown in front of a federal judge this week exposed the simmering tensions between the Trump administration’s fast-moving mass deportation campaign and the lawyers who are juggling the explosion of legal battles against it.

The administration’s attempts to arrest and deport tens of thousands of people from the country — without giving them much of a chance to fight their cases before they’re indefinitely jailed in immigration detention centers — have triggered an avalanche of lawsuits that are overwhelming courts and prosecutors.

“This system sucks” and “this job sucks,” one government lawyer said this week. Even Minnesota’s Trump-appointed top federal prosecutor recently admitted the caseload is “crushing” them.

Judges say it’s a crisis of the Trump administration’s own making, by blowing up due process rights in defiance of the Constitution.

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Last summer, the Trump administration “revisited” legal guidance on what happens when federal immigration officers make an arrest, deciding that anyone who is in the country without legal permission can be subject to mandatory detention, without an opportunity for a bond hearing to plead for their release.

Federal courts across the country quickly filled up with habeas corpus petitions, or lawsuits challenging their arrest and detention and demanding the government justify them to a judge.

Despite dozens or rulings against it, with judges repeatedly stressing that the administration’s policy flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment, administration officials and the government lawyers they’ve deployed to defend them have relied on the policy to arrest tens of thousands of people.

Dozens of new petitions are hitting court dockets every week and government attorneys are overwhelmed or quitting in droves under pressure to fight them at an unsustainable pace.

Prosecutors feel beaten down, defense attorneys are struggling to keep up, judges are writing furious orders with dramatic warnings about the fate of democracy — and the immigrants at the center of their cases are stuck in the middle, languishing in detention after their abrupt arrests, or released from custody after spending days or months in ICE custody with their lives turned upside-down.

Minnesota District Judge Jerry R. Blackwell wanted to hear from the government this week why he shouldn’t be holding officials in contempt for their “alarming” failures to follow court orders for their release.

Julie Le, a Homeland Security attorney assigned to help with the caseload inside the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota, admitted defeat.

“Sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor,” she told the judge, “so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep.”

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Lawyers for detained immigrants in Minnesota filed more than 400 petitions for their release from ICE in January alone, compared to just six at the same point one year earlier, one judge recently noted.

In a Texas district home to a massive ICE detention center holding a growing number of immigrant families, one judge recently noted that his court has 134 habeas petitions, with 20 to 25 new ones arriving on his docket each week.

At the same time, orders to release those immigrants are starting to pile up, and the government appears either too slow to respond or is ignoring them entirely.

Last week, Patrick J. Schiltz, the chief federal judge in Minnesota, ripped into the administration after he found ICE violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from the recent surge of officers into Minneapolis, or “more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

“ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this court,” wrote Judge Schlitz, who clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and was appointed to the bench by Republican George W. Bush. “But, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.”

Last week, Judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas issued a blistering ruling to release 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who “seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law.”

“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” he wrote. “This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.”

Last month in West Virginia, Judge Joseph R. Goodwin similarly condemned the administration’s efforts, where in “individuals are stopped during ordinary civilian activity, taken into custody for civil immigration purposes and confined in local jails without prompt hearings, without individualized findings and often far from counsel, family or community.”

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To be able to respond to the wave of new habeas petitions, Minnesota prosecutors have been forced to “shift resources away from other critical priorities, including criminal matters,” according to Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen.

He said his team of attorneys handling civil litigation is down by “50 percent” following a mass exodus of top prosecutors who fled in response to the Trump administration’s handling of Operation Metro Surge.

Rosen is now urging a federal appeals court to quickly settle the issue at the heart of the wave of litigation in his office, and one that is hovering over dozens of court cases across the country: Can ICE keep locking people up without a hearing?

If a decision isn’t reached fast enough, resources in Minnesota will “continue to be drained as hundreds more habeas petitions are filed, and the other important responsibilities and other priorities will be compromised,” Rosen wrote.

In response, lawyers for the immigrant at the center of the case said the question could determine his freedom and that of “countless individuals who are similarly situated.”

They urged the court to carefully consider an answer, “not subject to the duress of solving the government’s self-inflicted woes.”