Lawyers accuse immigration courts of holding ‘sham’ bond hearings

Last month, a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered an immigration judge to hold a bond hearing for a man who had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for months.

It was a win for the man’s Pasadena-based immigration lawyer Stacy Tolchin. The judge’s order came after Tolchin filed a Habeas Corpus petition to free her client. These petitions, which previously were a rarity in immigration courts, have now become a common response by lawyers to the Trump administration’s efforts to keep people detained indefinitely.

The next step for Tolchin was to go back to immigration court for the bond hearing. But that’s when her victory turned sour. The immigration judge issued a $50,000 bond. For a man with no criminal record.

Tolchin has practiced immigration law since 2001. She’s seen high bonds before, but only in rare circumstances. And never for someone like her client - a man who has been in the country for 25 years, has a family, a job and no criminal record.

“I had a $50,000 bond when there was an Interpol red warrant for a foreign arrest for murder,” she said. “That was a $50,000 bond case. So that tells you where we are now.”

Plus, in immigration court, people have to pay the full bond, not 10% like in criminal court, she said.

Tolchin’s case is part of a broader pattern that’s emerged in recent months. Immigration judges are ordering much higher bond amounts, or denying them altogether.

Immigration lawyers say it is the latest maneuver by the Trump administration to meet its deportation quotas. It started in 2025, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement administration made it much more difficult for ICE detainees to be released under bond or humanitarian programs within the immigration court system.

That’s when lawyers turned to federal courts and began filing Habeas Corpus petitions – a centuries-old legal remedy meant to protect people from being unlawfully imprisoned by the federal government.

Habeas petitions have become so common that federal courts in San Diego and Los Angeles have implemented new protocols to streamline the process - like requiring the government to respond within seven days or assigning cases to magistrate judges to increase the number of cases they hear, Tolchin said.

Lawyers have filed more than 50,000 Habeas petitions in federal courts across the country, according to data from Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative, formerly known as Habeas Dockets.

And they seemed to be working. At least at first.

“The vast majority of our Habeas petitions have been successful,” said Megan Day, an attorney at the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “I think in our office we’ve had above a 90 percent success rate.”

Each case felt like validation - federal judges agreeing that their clients should not have been indefinitely held in immigration detention.

But even before this latest issue, those wins felt bitter-sweet, Day said.

The damage had already been done. Some clients had already been detained for months, separated from their families and unable to work.

The petitions take hours to put together. Which means immigration lawyers - who are already in extremely high demand - are unable to take on more cases.

“It just takes a lot of time, effort and resources,” she said. “We could take on more bond cases or work on people’s immigration relief applications.”

Day and other immigration lawyers told KPBS their clients have lost apartments and jobs while detained. And even after they’re released, some show signs of PTSD from their time in detention.

“It’s frustrating to have to go to one part of the government to tell another government agency what they should be doing,” she said.

In a statement, the Executive Office for Immigration Review - a subagency within the U.S. Department of Justice that oversees immigration courts - said the Trump administration is complying with court orders and fully enforcing immigration law. They called the allegations from immigration lawyers “baseless” attacks.

The eight-minute hearing

Cassandra Lopez is a lawyer with Al Otro Lado, a San Diego immigrant rights organization. She says one of her bond hearings was decided in less than 10 minutes.

It came down to whether her client was a flight risk. Lopez says in immigration courts, the judges normally U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement the burden of proof on the lawyers representing ICE. But that’s not what happened U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement this case.

The immigration judge didn’t ask ICE lawyers any questions. Instead they put the burden on her client.

“The hearing lasted eight or nine minutes,” Lopez said.

She described this as an example of shifting culture within the immigration court system.

“We’ve seen the Trump administration fire immigration judges and hire deportation judges,” Lopez said. “We’re hiring judges that are just going to rubber-stamp our deportation apparatus.”

Lopez and other immigration lawyers have had clients lose hope, abandon their case and self-deport instead of staying in definition indefinitely. Sometimes, it feels like the goal, she said.

“That’s why the government is using immigration detention,” she said. “It’s not because these people are a danger or a flight risk.”

Tolchin says this is another example of how the immigration court system’s legitimacy is disappearing.

“We’re just really concerned that this really is a sham court at this point and it’s become an agent of the Trump administration,” she said.