How a centuries-old legal tool helped Nebraska immigrants leave ICE detention

A man who fled an uprising in the Middle East decades ago, and whose son serves in the U.S. Air Force, was taken into custody during a routine immigration appointment in Des Moines, Iowa.

Another man brought to the country as a child in 1999, who now has a U.S.-born child, was arrested after a minor traffic stop in southwest Missouri.

And a man from El Salvador with no criminal record spent weeks in a Nebraska prison that had been converted to hold immigrants fighting to stay in the country.

In each of these cases, a federal judge ruled that their confinement, detailed in what’s called a habeas corpus petition, violated their rights and they were released.

As President Donald Trump’s administration dramatically expanded who was subject to mandatory detention, more than 45,000 habeas corpus cases have flooded federal courts across the country. Petitioners have alleged that their detention was illegal and asked to be returned to their families so they can continue their civil immigration cases from home. An analysis by The Marshall Project and The Midwest Newsroom found that habeas corpus filings in four Midwestern states have been overwhelmingly successful thus far.

In Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, more than 450 cases have been filed since Trump’s inauguration last year. The vast majority of people in the roughly 160 cases that had been resolved through mid-April were granted a hearing to determine if they could be let out of detention on bond, or in some cases, were released outright.

“It’s actually really remarkable,” said Suchita Mathur, an attorney with the American Immigration Council, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for immigrants. “I’ve never heard or seen any legal issue with this much consensus among district court judges.”

But as the Trump administration files appeals to attempt to narrow the discretion of judges in habeas corpus cases about immigration, the legal landscape is in flux.

Habeas outcomes

The legal concept of habeas corpus dates back over 800 years to the Magna Carta in England. For centuries, people in prison have used it to challenge confinement. Today, petitioners in civil immigration cases have used the legal mechanism to fight the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy. Noncitizens have argued they should be released because of prolonged detention, a lack of access to bond hearings or inhumane conditions in the facilities where they are held.

We reviewed nearly 160 case filings in the four states covered by The Midwest Newsroom, but are not naming the immigrants who filed the petitions because nearly all of them still have immigration claims pending, and many expressed a fear of retaliation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.

The Trump administration has justified its large-scale arrests and mass raids on immigrant communities in several major cities by saying it is targeting the worst of the worst, but a review of the filings in habeas corpus cases undercuts those claims. Among the people held in ICE detention in these Midwestern states were people with pending asylum cases, no criminal history and parents of U.S.-born children.

The Department of Homeland Security, for example, recently contended in court documents that a man from Spain should be subject to mandatory detention and then deportation. He filed a habeas corpus petition while he was being held in the Cass County jail south of Omaha, Nebraska, after being arrested in January during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.

In 2022, under the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security had granted the man permission to stay in the U.S. because he was a minor who had suffered physical and emotional abuse by a parent.