Lawyers Are Building a New Infrastructure to Fight Trump’s Deportation Machine

Coalitions of attorneys, rights groups, and other organizations are developing a powerful new infrastructure to challenge the Trump administration’s mass deportation machine. Several so-called habeas projects have been created in states or regions across the country in recent months to connect noncitizens facing unlawful detention with pro bono attorneys who can file habeas corpus petitions on their behalf in federal court.

“When it became clear that the administration had made it its priority to prevent people from accessing bond and immigration courts and, really the mission of the administration seems to be to keep people in detention for as long as possible, we saw a need to help facilitate access to the federal courts,” Christy Rodriguez, a senior immigration attorney at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI), told Truthout. MLRI is one of the groups leading the Habeas Project of New England, which serves immigrants jailed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, or Vermont, as well as Massachusetts residents jailed in Connecticut.

Similar projects have also been launched to support jailed migrants in New Mexico, New York, Minnesota, and some Gulf Coast states. The National Immigration Project coordinates regular check-in calls across several habeas projects so member organizations can share best practices, talk trends in case law, and support each other.

Habeas corpus, meaning the right to challenge your detention before a judge, is one of the oldest rights in the U.S. legal system. But for many of the immigrants incarcerated in ICE jails, accessing federal court to enforce that right is impossible without the cost-free support that habeas projects provide. Rodriguez said that since the Habeas Project of New England was launched, it has compiled a list of about 200 federal litigators willing to take on cases, and it has screened over 220 cases.

“Habeas is an opportunity [to challenge unlawful detention],” Amy Romero, chief legal counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island and a mentor with the Habeas Project of New England, told Truthout. “It’s a review of the constitutional rights of people, which includes the right to due process, and we keep seeing that courts keep finding that these detentions are unconstitutional, that people are being held without due process.”

When a court finds a detention is unlawful, it can order the person be released or grant them a bond hearing — returning people to their families and communities. “It truly can mean the difference between someone being released or not released,” Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project, told Truthout.

Habeas proceedings have been a vital tool in the fight to free or slow the transfers of several high-profile individuals jailed by ICE, including Rümeysa Öztürk and Badar Khan Suri.

New habeas projects have been created in a matter of months as rights groups and organizers work to provide services for a skyrocketing population in immigration detention nationwide. One of the youngest networks is in New Mexico, where the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Mexico and partner organizations launched the New Mexico Habeas Project in April.

“It took us all in all about four to five months to put this together, which in the world of nonprofits is lightning fast, especially when it comes to collaborating across organizations, creating a new program structure that hasn’t existed before, and really tailoring it to meet a need in real time,” Rebecca Sheff, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico, told Truthout.

As soon as the project began soliciting volunteers, Sheff said the response was overwhelming. Habeas petitions tend to be formulaic, and anyone admitted to federal court in New Mexico can file them. The New Mexico Habeas Project, like other habeas projects, provides training and mentorship, partnering federal litigators with experienced immigration and habeas attorneys. This has meant that attorneys who usually specialize in everything from civil rights and environmental law to transactional and personal injury cases have stepped up to help. Law students have also been eager to contribute by tracking trends in case law, conducting research, and helping draft memos or templates.

“It speaks to where we are politically that this has become such a pressing need to where we have attorneys diving in who have never dove in in this way before,” Sheff said. “We’re trying to be creative in finding ways for everyone who’s interested to plug into this work.”

Rodriguez also told Truthout that thanks to training opportunities offered by the Habeas Project of New England, she has heard from more lawyers who are applying for admission to the federal bar, growing the pool of attorneys who can practice in federal courts and file habeas petitions. “Right now we’re seeing especially immigration attorneys are getting admitted, and a lot of times they have maybe done a habeas case in partnership with one of our federal litigators, have gained some experience and confidence in federal courts, and then are able to go out and do it on their own the next time,” Rodriguez said.

The need for pro bono habeas support has skyrocketed since the Trump administration expanded the population subject to mandatory immigration detention and restricted access to bond hearings. A July 8, 2025, memo from acting ICE Director Todd Lyons announced the Department of Homeland Security had reclassified many noncitizens, including some who have lived in the country for years, as “applicants for admission” to the U.S. The change was made for the purpose of enforcing part of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which states that such noncitizens are subject to mandatory detention and are not eligible for a bond hearing before an immigration judge. That provision of the law has historically only been applied to newly arriving individuals at ports of entry.

Before Lyons’s memo came down, millions fewer immigrants were treated as eligible for detention, and those who were jailed could be released on bond at the discretion of immigration judges working for the executive branch. As soon as that path was foreclosed, courts nationwide saw a surge in habeas corpus filings. The number of petitions filed in district courts totaled around 8,000 in 2025, compared to just 222 the previous year, according to data from the Free Law Project’s CourtListener database analyzed by The Washington Times.

The surge in cases has overwhelmed U.S. attorneys’ offices, responsible for enforcing federal law, and attorneys representing immigrants alike. The strain on U.S. attorneys’ offices has made the job of defending Trump’s immigration crackdown less attractive. Julie Le, a lawyer responsible for arguing the federal government’s side in dozens of habeas cases, told a federal judge in February, “This job sucks,” according to a court transcript.

For those on the other side, their jobs are made even more difficult by the Trump administration’s strategy of shuttling jailed immigrants from one detention center to the next across state lines. Attorneys must be members of a state’s bar association to practice in that state, meaning if their client is moved to a state where they are not barred, they must find local attorneys to sign onto their client’s case.

Recognizing the challenge this poses, and the rising caseload, the Habeas Project of New England, the Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island, and Mass Deportation Defense requested that a Rhode Island federal court allow out-of-state lawyers to represent immigration detainees. A judge ordered that rule change in mid-April, and it will remain in effect for a year. The Providence Journal reported that, according to the court’s records, as of March 6, about 33 percent of the civil cases filed were habeas petitions, up from less than 10 percent in 2025, and only 2.4 percent, or a mere five cases, in 2024.

“It would be so extraordinarily important if other courts followed what Rhode Island did,” Romero said. Because right now, “ICE keeps moving people across the country, and it’s creating a huge problem with your ability to access your counsel.”

Even as the number of habeas projects and their pools of volunteer litigators grow, a significant need for support remains. Shebaya told Truthout she hopes attorneys and advocates will continue to join, and that organizations in underserved areas will use the habeas project model to provide needed support in their communities. “It’s become more important than ever for people to come to us, jump in, we will train them, we will support them, and then they will be able to directly impact the lives of people who are detained, give them an avenue, and hope, and get them released,” she said.

Sheff told Truthout the results of this work are not only rewarding for jailed migrants who are able to access federal courts to enforce their rights and potentially secure release, but also for the organizers, advocates, and attorneys on the other side of the equation.

“A lot of people, attorneys, judges, and so on, who haven’t been as closely connected to the lived realities of people in ICE detention are getting this crash course — people’s lives are in their hands, their freedom is in their hands,” Sheff said. “It’s really powerful to see how folks are rising to meet the moment.”