About Time? Trump’s immigration courts are testing federal judges’ patience

Kyle Cheney for Politico reports that federal judges have concluded more than 13,000 times in recent months that ICE has illegally detained people. A flood of cases brought by ICE detainees allege that their bond hearings in immigration courts violated due process. The response:

"Federal judges — who by law have no power to second-guess the discretionary decisions of Justice Department-run immigration courts — are often simply sidestepping them, ordering the immediate release of people from ICE detention rather than subject them to bond hearings they view as preordained.

Increasingly, federal judges are also dissecting immigration court hearings for constitutional infirmities, finding that IJs applied unconstitutional standards, ignored evidence that undercut their conclusions, failed to consider alternatives to detention or made illogical leaps to justify detention without explanation.

Though they may not have the power to review an immigration court’s factual conclusions, federal judges say, they can decide whether a hearing was `fundamentally unfair,' . . . Those reviews can result in an order for a new bond hearing or outright release."