As the number of people held inside immigration detention centers in the United States climbs to record highs under the Trump administration, so have the amount of federal court cases from immigrants claiming that their detention is unlawful.
In Louisiana — which has maintained the second highest detained immigrant population in the country for the past several years — the number of these wrongful detention cases filed in federal courts has skyrocketed since President Donald Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda began in January 2025. The administration’s dragnet approach to immigration enforcement has meant that many people, who in previous years would not have been priorities for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, are now languishing in civil immigration detention.
Data collected by ProPublica shows that habeas corpus filings — which allow someone to argue that they have been unlawfully incarcerated — in federal courts across the country rose to roughly 2,000 habeas petitions per week in February, compared to just over 20 cases per week nationwide for that month last year.
Louisiana’s federal courts have likewise seen a sharp uptick in habeas cases from immigrants. A Verite News analysis of court records found that immigrants have filed at least 752 such cases since the beginning of Trump’s second term — 378 of them in the first two months of 2026 alone. That’s compared to 29 for all of 2024, President Joe Biden’s last year in office.
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Many of those people filed habeas corpus petitions after they languished in detention well beyond six months — the threshold, under Supreme Court precedent, after which detention can be considered prolonged and indefinite, particularly if it appears unlikely that the federal government will be successful in deporting the detained person. A Gulf States Newsroom analysis of habeas corpus petitions from Cameroonian asylum seekers in 2021 found that many of those petitioners had been detained for roughly one year. One man had been detained for more than three years.
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