Lawfare Daily: The Thousands of Lawsuits Challenging Pres. Trump’s Mandatory Alien Detention Policy
Politico reporter Kyle Cheney discusses the thousands of habeas corpus cases he has pored through.
Kyle Cheney, senior legal affairs reporter for Politico, speaks to Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff about the thousands of habeas corpus cases he has pored through challenging a Trump administration policy requiring mandatory detention for most detained aliens.
They discuss how judges have ruled on these cases, the degree to which those rulings do or don’t correlate with political expectations, the appellate prospects for such cases, and why they haven’t been resolved by class action.
More reading on this topic:
- "Hundreds of judges reject Trump’s mandatory detention policy, with no end in sight," by Kyle Cheney, Politico (January 5, 2026)
- "Judges, inundated with immigration cases, don’t mince words on ICE tactics," by Kyle Cheney, Politico (January 26, 2026)
- Kyle's thread on Minnesota cases on X
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Roger Parloff is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. For 12 years, he was the main legal correspondent at Fortune Magazine. His work has also been published in ProPublica, The New York Times, New York, NewYorker.com, Yahoo Finance, Air Mail, IEEE Spectrum, Inside, Legal Affairs, Brill’s Content, and others. An attorney who no longer practices, he is the author of "Triple Jeopardy," a book about an Arizona death penalty case. He is a senior editor at Lawfare.
Kyle Cheney is a senior legal affairs reporter for Politico.
Jen Patja is the editor of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security, and serves as Lawfare’s Director of Audience Engagement. Previously, she was Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics and Deputy Director of the Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier, where she worked to deepen public understanding of constitutional democracy and inspire meaningful civic participation.
