Three Hundred Habeas Cases in Which the Government Has Defied Court Orders

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What does it look like when the government violates court orders in 300 separate immigration habeas cases?  It looks like the case of Alberto Castaneda Mondragon. 

On Jan. 23, U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank of the District of Minnesota granted a writ of habeas corpus to Castaneda Mondragon and ordered his immediate release from custody. “Release from custody” in his case didn’t mean release from jail or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. He was in a hospital bed at the time. In his case, release meant the removal of restraints that bound him to that hospital bed and the departure from the hospital of the ICE officers who were guarding him. The judge ordered the government to file a status update confirming Castaneda Mondragon’s release by Jan. 26.

The government violated the court’s order and didn’t file the update by the deadline Judge Frank had imposed. 

Castaneda Mondragon, a Mexican national, had been arrested by ICE agents in St. Paul, Minnesota as part of the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge” on Jan. 8. After his arrest and detention, according to the judge’s own telling, ICE agents had taken him to a Minnesota hospital for an evaluation of apparent head injuries. After conducting a CT scan, doctors had diagnosed Castaneda Mondragon with “the following life-threatening injuries: skull fractures to the right frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital, sphenoid, and orbital bones and zygomatic arch and left temporal bone; and epidural, subdural, subarachnoid, intracerebral, and intraparenchymal hemorrhages.” Because of the severity of his injuries, Castaneda Mondragon had been transferred to another hospital for “enhanced care” and “detention.”

According to the court, ICE agents had refused to leave the hospital. Two agents had been “present at the hospital at all times” since Castaneda Mondragon’s admittance. They also used handcuffs to shackle Castaneda Mondragon’s legs. After a reported dispute with hospital staff over the use of restraints, Castaneda Mondragon was later confined by hospital-issued four-point restraints attached to his hospital bed, the result of an apparent compromise. 

Castaneda Mondragon reportedly told hospital staff that his injuries were the result of bodily dragging and other mistreatment by federal agents. ICE agents, for their part, largely refused to discuss how Castaneda Mondragon sustained his injuries, stating only that he “got his shit rocked” and purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall—a claim that a nurse at the hospital later told the Associated Press was “laughable.” While Castaneda Mondragon was initially able to speak with hospital staff, by Jan. 23, according to the court, he was “experiencing difficulty communicating verbally.”

Two days after the government failed to confirm Cataneda Mondragon’s release, at 1:00 p.m. on Jan. 28, the judge wrote: “Absent assurance that Petitioner will be released by 2:00 p.m. CT on January 28, 2026, the Court will issue an order to show cause why Respondents should not be held in contempt, and a contempt hearing shall be scheduled.”

The government’s response to this threat, in two letters to the court filed that day, apparently satisfied the judge—as no further records appear on the docket.

The government’s widespread noncompliance also looks like a case that began roughly two weeks earlier, on Jan. 15, 2026. On that day, according to court documents, multiple ICE agents allegedly entered the Minnesota home of six Venezuelan nationals. They did so without a warrant and detained the Venezuelans at gunpoint. After the six individuals—one of whom is a 12-year old child with asthma—filed their joint petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the court ordered the government to produce a judicial warrant justifying ICE’s entry into their home and to do so by Jan. 19. 

As in the Castaneda Mondragon case, the government did not comply. As a result, the court granted the petition and ordered the government to return all six petitioners to Minnesota and release them by Jan. 22, with a status update due on Jan. 24. At a status conference on Jan. 22, the government informed the court that all six petitioners—including the child, who was held without an inhaler—had been transferred to a detention facility in Texas. By Jan. 25, the government had missed both the court’s deadline to return the detainees to Minnesota and the deadline to release them from custody. And it still had not presented a judicial warrant to justify the original action. Indeed, U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim noted that the government “have not made a single filing on the Docket in this case, aside from Counsel’s Notice of Appearance” (emphasis in original). 

By Jan. 31, the government had released all of the petitioners from custody, and the court had ruled that the petitioners’ arrests were unlawful. The case was over—at least, it seemed to be over until Feb. 21, when the petitioners informed the court that the government had “refused to cooperate in returning” their personal belongings—including two petitioners’ work permits and one’s driver’s license. The government had also imposed conditions on their release—something the court’s order had not contemplated and about which the judge expressed doubts as to legality. That day, the court ordered the government to file a memorandum explaining its authority to impose the conditions of release within 72 hours, or else to confirm that the conditions on the petitioners had been removed and that their property was returned. 

Once again, the government failed to respond by the court’s deadline. 

As of March 6, the government had returned the driver’s license, but still failed to return the two work permits. Judge Tunheim has now scheduled a hearing for April 6 to consider imposing civil contempt and imposing daily civil fines until the government fully complies with his orders.

These cases are but two of the hundreds of immigration habeas cases since the beginning of the second Trump administration in which judges around the country have found that the federal government has not fully complied with court orders. The violations of court orders span a considerable range, from relatively harmless mistakes in which required papers were filed with brief delays to situations in which detainees were transferred to a different district in violation of its order, held for protracted periods despite release orders, or even deported in violation of orders. In numerous cases, detainee property was not returned, despite orders to do so. And in some cases, ICE denied detainees access to medically necessary drugs despite orders to permit such access.

That the government has violated court orders in numerous immigration habeas cases is not, in itself, news. Any number of media stories have focused on particularly high-profile cases. For example, a Minnesota judge’s decision to hold a Justice Department attorney in contempt for failing to return Rigoberto Soto Jimenez’s identification documents after his release from detention made national news. The deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan nationals to the Terrorism Confinement Center (known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT) in El Salvador despite a Washington, D.C., judge’s order enjoining their removal did as well. The range of judges calling out violations of court orders in habeas cases has also garnered notice. “Throughout the first year of Trump’s second term, there have been high-profile examples in which judges have accused ICE and the Department of Homeland Security of violating court orders,” writes Kyle Cheney in Politico. “But the sheer volume of violations judges are now describing reflects an intensification of the mass deportation effort and a system ill-prepared to handle the influx.” 

Both in Minnesota and in New Jersey, judges have taken steps to identify the breadth of the pattern in orders that have garnered significant press. For example, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz in Minnesota has identified 210 orders in 143 cases with which the government failed to comply, noting that “the court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt—again and again and again—to force the United States government to comply with court orders.” And U.S. District Judge Michael E. Farbiarz in New Jersey ordered the government to identify its own failures of compliance, producing a much-noted list of more than 50 failures of compliance—which U.S. District Judge Christine P. O’Hearn later described as incomplete.

The data assembled here, however, is different—more comprehensive across time and judicial geography than prior lists, vastly wider in number of cases, and analyzed and categorized with a consistent methodology notwithstanding different judges’ differing language about and toleration for government compliance failures. Unlike prior efforts to identify compliance failure on the part of the government, we have also endeavored to make the data underlying this study available to anyone who wants to use it. The data visualization that accompanies this article allows users to search cases by jurisdiction and by violation type, to see the nature of the violation in any case, to access the underlying dockets for each case, and to download data for further analysis.

The Scope of the Dataset 

The 300 cases represented here do not represent a comprehensive list of civil litigations in which the Trump administration has violated court orders. They are, for starters, limited to habeas corpus cases in the immigration context. And they don’t even represent a comprehensive list of violated court orders in those cases. 

We are confident that some number of cases have escaped our efforts at identification. That said, this list of cases is more than double the size of any other list of cases in which the government violated court orders. Prior lists have tended to catalogue violated orders or the number of violations. This list, by contrast, identifies separate cases in which judicial orders have been violated—sometimes numerous times in a single case.

The violated court orders span 20 judicial districts around the country, but they are not distributed evenly. Nearly two thirds of them (199 cases) took place in the District of Minnesota—the site of Operation Metro Surge. The runner-up jurisdiction, the District of New Jersey—saw 57 cases. The Eastern District of California saw 10 cases. The Eastern District of New York saw six cases. No other district nationwide saw more than five.

These numbers may be biased by the fact that ICE operations in Minnesota and New Jersey received enormous press attention. And the aforementioned lists chronicling government noncompliance produced by a judge in Minnesota and by the Justice Department, pursuant to court order, in New Jersey also makes it far easier to identify qualifying cases in these jurisdictions than elsewhere. But this imbalance also reflects the remarkable abusiveness of those operations, and the strain they created for the often understaffed U.S. attorneys offices who had to defend them in court. The intensity of the operations created an unmanageable litigation burden for the Justice Department, one that caused errors in large numbers.

The most common violation is simply failing to file briefs, justification for a petitioner’s detention, or updates and status reports to courts that had ordered them. In some of these 143 cases, these errors are simply matters of tardiness: an update is due on a particular date at a particular time, and it comes in a day or an hour late. For example, in Stalin Fernando C. T. v. Bondi et al, the government filed a status update on the petitioner’s release more than 24 hours after the court’s deadline.

Such filing errors are not entirely harmless. In habeas cases, after all, the government is depriving a person of his or her freedom, and the order to file a justification for detention is thus an order to provide a lawful basis for locking someone up. Ignoring such an order, therefore, is ignoring an order to eschew arbitrary detention.

And at least some filing errors are far from harmless. In the District of New Jersey’s Cartagena v. Soto, for example, the government failed to file an expedited answer to the court’s order to conduct a bond hearing and refrain from transferring the petitioner. While maintaining its silence toward the court, the government transferred the petitioner—in violation of the court’s order—from New Jersey to Oklahoma to Texas, and then from Texas back to Oklahoma.  

The second most common violation is the failure to release the detainee in a timely fashion. These cases include situations in which the government is ordered to release a detainee and confirm it has done so and fails to confirm it so the court does not know whether the detainee has been released or not. (In situations in which the docket is clear that the detainee was released and the government’s non-compliance was merely a failure to confirm the release per the court’s order, we characterized the cases as filing errors, not failure to release.)

There are 110 failures to timely release the detainee, and again, these cases range a great deal in their severity. In the most benign, a detainee is released a few hours after the deadline; for example, in Minnesota’s Brandon P.S. v. Bondi, et al, on Jan. 27 the court ordered the government to release the petitioner within 48 hours. Forty-eight hours came and went, and as of 1:24 on Jan. 30, the petitioner remained in custody in Texas. The petitioner was released later that day in Minnesota. In the more severe of these cases, by contrast, people have been held for days or weeks despite court orders holding that their detention is unlawful. For example, in Edwin Mauricio Z.P. v. Bondi, et al, the court ordered the government to hold a bond hearing or release the petitioner by Jan. 27. The government replied and said that it had indeed released the petitioner. But this was a misrepresentation. After another court order, the petitioner was released “sometime before 5 pm” on Jan. 30.

A variant of the failure to release a detainee is the government’s imposition of conditions of release—the most extreme of which included ankle monitor surveillance and check-ins with ICE every two weeks—despite court orders that don’t permit such conditions. In 50 cases, courts found that faced with an order to release a detainee unlawfully held, the government had attached conditions to the release in a fashion that violated the court’s order. In 30 cases, the government failed to hold a court-ordered bond hearing. In five cases, the government ignored orders to coordinate the release of detainees with their lawyers, so that they did not get released in frigid temperatures with no money, transportation, or warm clothes.

In a large number of cases, detainees have been transferred out of the district in which they filed their habeas petitions despite court orders to keep them local. There are 49 of these cases, and it’s not always clear from the docket whether the transfer took place before or after the order forbidding it came down. In some cases, however, this is crystal clear. For example, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan in Enrique L. v. Bondi, et al, wrote that “On Jan. 20, 2026, and 10:06 a.m., Respondents were enjoined from moving the Petitioner out of Minnesota. Petitioner was transferred out of Minnesota at 2:10pm that day.” And in Andrei C. v. Lyons, et al, “on Jan. 12, 2026, at 11:32 a.m., the Court enjoined Respondents from transporting Petitioner outside of Minnesota. Respondents moved Petitioner to Texas that afternoon, after the Court’s order had been served on Respondents.” In any event, judges in 36 cases found that orders to return a detainee to the jurisdiction of the habeas court were not followed—sometimes for protracted periods of time. In eight cases, detainees were actually deported despite orders enjoining their removal from the country.

Another recurrent theme, as illustrated in the case of the six Venezuelan nationals above, is the failure to return property seized at the time of a detainee’s arrest. In 49 cases, judges found violations of orders to return detainee property. And in two cases, there are specific findings that detainees were denied access to medication. 

Again, there’s a range of severity in failure-to-return-property cases. In some, the violation amounts to merely a brief delay in getting back possessions. In other cases, the deprivation is more severe. For example, in Soto Jimenez v. Bondi, the court granted Soto Jimenez’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, ordered him released in Minnesota by Feb.13, and ordered the government to return all of his property. Four days later, Soto Jimenez’s counsel informed the court that he has been released in Texas—not Minnesota as per the court’s order—and that the government had failed to return various identifying documents, including his Minnesota driver’s license, his Minnesota Instruction Permit, and his Mexican Consular ID card. Released in an unfamiliar state without any identifying documents, Soto Jimenez spent the night in a shelter. The next day, Soto Jimenez’s attorneys arranged for his flight back to Minnesota using donated flight miles.  

Finally, in a number of the cases judges accuse the government of failing to follow evidentiary or procedural orders. In 33 cases, for example, courts accuse the government of failing to turn over evidence the court had ordered produced. And in five cases, the courts accuse the government of misrepresenting facts to the court.

Judicial Enforcement, Its Limits, and Accountability

One striking feature of this body of cases is how effective district judges across the country have been in bringing the government into compliance with their orders. Judges have had to issue follow-up orders, they have occasionally conducted hearings to show cause as to why the government has failed to comply, and they have often threatened contempt or the imposition of daily fines—though actual contempt findings have been rare. In almost all cases, the government is ultimately  brought into line. 

Save a few of the more severe examples—such as Sandra C. v. Bondi, et al, which saw seven distinct violations throughout the duration of the case—there are largely no protracted periods of time in which the courts have failed to bring the government into compliance.

 Still, 300 instances of government noncompliance with court orders presents a serious rule of law issue of its own. And failing to return personal property—not to mention holding detainees even briefly longer than a court’s order directs—injures an individual person’s liberty and, more generally, the confidence of the society that government operates under the law.

If the courts have been effective in bringing the government into compliance, they have been far less so in ensuring accountability for the violation of their orders. Generally speaking, these cases end when the government complies. Even in Minnesota, judges have relied on the civil contempt process—mostly through threats—to force the government to comply with orders; they have not resorted to the criminal contempt process to punish those responsible for violating court orders. In most cases, the people responsible for violations are not even identified. So the cases raise a question of impunity for serial violations of court orders across jurisdictions and time. 

One reason for this is that these judges, who are also overwhelmed by a sharp spike in habeas petitions since the beginning of the second Trump administration, are operating on an individual case-by-case basis. The individual judge is faced with an individual detainee and an individual set of orders he or she is trying to enforce—not a broad pattern of violating court orders. Indeed, aside from case captions on joint orders for show cause hearings, and the aforementioned lists produced by Judge Schiltz in Minnesota and the Justice Department in New Jersey, there is no coordinated, publicly-available record keeping of government non-compliance in habeas cases throughout the country. In some cases—like many included in the New Jersey list—evidence of government noncompliance is actually nowhere to be found even on a case’s individual docket. Were it not for the government’s admissions in these instances, which took place in other cases, it’s likely judges would not have even known there had been noncompliance issues in the courts in the first place. 

This dataset—while not comprehensive—is an attempt to offer a coordinated, centralized mechanism for tracking noncompliance in habeas cases across the country. This is a modest administrative achievement, but it represents something genuinely new. Habeas cases are, by nature, atomized. They’re filed in dozens of districts, assigned to hundreds of judges, and resolved (or not) in courtrooms that rarely communicate with one another. Each court sees a piece of the problem. No court sees the whole picture.

This dataset is an attempt to stitch these pieces together. The ability to view hundreds of cases side by side, with the same types of violations recurring across jurisdictions makes what looks like isolated noncompliance in a single courtroom resemble something closer to government policy. The government’s individual explanations in each case (such as an administrative error, lack of notice, or miscommunication between counsel and ICE) begin to strain credulity in ways they may not when the cases are viewed in isolation from one another.

A Note on Methodology

The data assembled represents every immigration habeas case we have identified since the beginning of the second Trump administration in which the government failed to comply with a court order. Note that the dataset counts cases in which court orders were violated, not the number of violations or the number of court orders the government violated. Many of the cases encompass multiple violations. The cases are drawn from a number of different sources: press coverage has identified a number of cases; cases sometimes cite one another; as described above, some judges have compiled lists of violated orders in their districts; and one judge in New Jersey ordered the government to self-report its own violations. In addition to these cases, we used Anthropic’s Claude to write programs to scour every docket available on Courtlistener for every federal court in the country for cases that appeared similar to those in which violations had occurred. After Claude identified a large volume of cases, our human analysts examined each case to determine whether or not to include it in the dataset. No case is included in this database without a human judgment that a judge had found a violation of a court order.

While we have included any number of violations that may seem trivial, we have also excluded a lot of cases where judges have identified genuine governmental misconduct or become upset by government arguments. For example, in many cases around the country, the government has infuriated judges by raising issues rejected in dozens of similar cases. In some instances, this has led to threats of sanctions. We have excluded all such cases on grounds that they are not violations of specific court orders. This is not, we emphasize, a list of cases in which the government’s conduct has been deficient or has annoyed judges. It is a list of cases in which a court has ordered something specific and that order was not fully followed.

Finally, here are how we resolved some judgment calls:

• Where the government has been ordered to file a document and has failed to do so, such as a response to a habeas petition, we categorized that as a “failure to file” and a violation of the court order. Where, by contrast, there is no specific order to file a particular document and the government effectively defaults the case or an argument by failing to file a response, we do not consider that a “failure to file” in violation of an order, just a default or a waiver of the argument.
• Where the government is ordered to release a detainee and file a document confirming the release and it fails to file the confirmation, we consider that a “failure to timely release” unless there is evidence that the release itself happened. In this latter situation, we do not treat such cases as “failure to timely release,” only as a “failure to file.” In a number of cases, there are documents listed on the docket but unavailable to the public that may clarify that a detainee was, in fact, timely released about whom no such evidence was previously available. We reserve the right to change categorizations if and when such material becomes public.
• Similarly, in situations in which a detainee was transferred out of a judicial district despite a court order to keep the detainee local, it is not always clear when the order issued relative to the transfer. We have treated these cases as reflecting a “transfer despite order” unless it is clear that the court order post-dated the transfer. In some instances, again, documents unavailable on the public docket might shed light on this question. We reserve the right to update records as more material becomes public. 

We will continue to add cases to the database as we become aware of them. As the database grows, the numbers reflected in this article will cease to correspond with the number reflected in the database.

This resource is a work in progress. Please share any missing data or possible errors with tips@lawfaremedia.org.