This story is a collaboration between The Midwest Newsroom and The Marshall Project.
A man who fled an uprising in the Middle East decades ago, and whose son serves in the U.S. Air Force, was taken into custody during a routine immigration appointment in Des Moines, Iowa.
Another man brought to the country as a child in 1999, who now has a U.S.-born child, was arrested after a minor traffic stop in southwest Missouri.
And a man from El Salvador with no criminal record spent weeks in a Nebraska prison that had been converted to hold immigrants fighting to stay in the country.
In each of these cases, a federal judge ruled that their confinement, detailed in what’s called a habeas corpus petition, violated their rights and they were released.
As President Donald Trump’s administration dramatically expanded who was subject to mandatory detention, more than 45,000 habeas corpus cases have flooded federal courts across the country. Petitioners have alleged that their detention was illegal and asked to be returned to their families so they can continue their civil immigration cases from home. An analysis by The Marshall Project and The Midwest Newsroom found that habeas corpus filings in four Midwestern states have been overwhelmingly successful thus far.
In Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, more than 450 cases have been filed since Trump’s inauguration last year. The vast majority of people in the roughly 160 cases that had been resolved through mid-April were granted a hearing to determine if they could be let out of detention on bond, or in some cases, were released outright.
“It’s actually really remarkable,” said Suchita Mathur, an attorney with the American Immigration Council, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for immigrants. “I’ve never heard or seen any legal issue with this much consensus among district court judges.”
But as the Trump administration files appeals to attempt to narrow the discretion of judges in habeas corpus cases about immigration, the legal landscape is in flux.
Habeas outcomes
The legal concept of habeas corpus dates back over 800 years to the Magna Carta in England. For centuries, people in prison have used it to challenge confinement. Today, petitioners in civil immigration cases have used the legal mechanism to fight the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy. Noncitizens have argued they should be released because of prolonged detention, a lack of access to bond hearings or inhumane conditions in the facilities where they are held.
We reviewed nearly 160 case filings in the four states covered by The Midwest Newsroom, but are not naming the immigrants who filed the petitions because nearly all of them still have immigration claims pending, and many expressed a fear of retaliation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Trump administration has justified its large-scale arrests and mass raids on immigrant communities in several major cities by saying it is targeting the worst of the worst, but a review of the filings in habeas corpus cases undercuts those claims. Among the people held in ICE detention in these Midwestern states were people with pending asylum cases, no criminal history and parents of U.S.-born children.
The Department of Homeland Security, for example, recently contended in court documents that a man from Spain should be subject to mandatory detention and then deportation. He filed a habeas corpus petition while he was being held in the Cass County jail south of Omaha, Nebraska, after being arrested in January during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.
In 2022, under the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security had granted the man permission to stay in the U.S. because he was a minor who had suffered physical and emotional abuse by a parent.
Despite its prior decision, the department now wanted “a young man with no criminal history” to be immediately deported, U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon in Nebraska wrote in March. The judge ordered Homeland Security officials to release him.
The man’s case was among 35 of the nearly 160 in which a judge granted release – the rest of the successful petitioners won relief through other means such as a bond hearing. Others included a father whose children suffered “significant mental health concerns” after his arrest and a woman whose fear of returning to Honduras had been established during an interview with an asylum officer.
Another woman who was released has lived in the U.S. for 20 years and was detained while attending her son’s military graduation at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks. A judge in the Western District of Missouri noted she had work authorization and no known criminal convictions.
“If people were able to wrap their minds around what’s happening, most Americans would be absolutely shocked,” said Mathur, with the American Immigration Council. “The government is now saying that anyone — no matter how long they’ve lived here, no matter how many U.S.-citizen kids or family they have, no matter if they’ve ever had any trouble with the law — they are subject to being detained for absolutely no reason.”
In another case, a federal judge in Kansas ordered ICE to release a man who had been detained for 17 months because the U.S. had made no progress in identifying a country to send him to after determining that it was unsafe for him to return to his country of origin, Honduras. But hours after the judge issued the release order in October, the man was deported to Mexico.
In the four-state analysis, few cases were unsuccessful. In fact, seven federal judges denied only 15 petitions. U.S. District Judge Brian Buescher, who was appointed to the Nebraska federal bench by Trump in his first term, denied all seven of the cases in the newsrooms’ analysis that he heard, the most of any judge.
In response to an email seeking comment, Buescher noted the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit “substantially agreed” with his interpretation of the law in a recent ruling in favor of the Trump administration’s detention policy.
A shifting legal landscape
Although habeas corpus filings have been largely granted in these four Midwestern states, a flurry of conflicting federal appeals court decisions has made it trickier for petitioners to succeed.
The appeals largely hinge on the interpretation of two words: seeking admission. Since the 1990s, that phrase has applied to people arriving at a border or a port of entry. People who had been in the country for years weren’t considered to be “seeking admission” and were eligible for a bond hearing — a practice that has long been the norm. But the Trump administration began arguing they were “seeking admission” and therefore didn’t have the right to a bond hearing.
The Trump administration appealed the decision in the case of a man named Joaquin Herrera Avila, a Mexican native who entered the U.S. in 2006 and was arrested in August in Minneapolis, and was granted a bond hearing. A three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled 2-1 in favor of the administration. The decision is binding in seven states, including Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska, and means that noncitizens in parts of the Midwest will now routinely be held without bond. A similar ruling was handed down in the 5th Circuit, covering Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
Amid the shifting legal landscape, immigration attorneys are now having to focus their legal arguments on constitutional claims related to due process rights — rather than the government’s interpretation of “seeking admission.” An appeal on the due process argument is also pending in the 5th Circuit.
When denied bond, people can be held for months or years before their immigration cases are resolved. It’s one tactic, several attorneys said, that the government is using to pressure people to agree to leave the U.S.
In his dissent in the 8th Circuit case, Court of Appeals Judge Ralph Erickson of North Dakota wrote that Avila had been law-abiding for about 20 years except for one instance of driving under the influence. Due to a 1996 immigration law, he wrote, Avila and “millions of others” who were working and living productive lives in the United States would have been entitled to a bond hearing, but now if they were arrested by ICE would be subject to mandatory detention.
“In doing so,” Erickson wrote, “the court does not rely on recent Congressional action or a change in the regulations governing detention but rather engages in a novel interpretation of ‘alien seeking admission’ that eluded the courts and five previous presidential administrations.”
Lawyers say holding immigrants without bond should also greatly concern U.S. citizens, dozens of whom have been swept up across the country by ICE.
“It really gives them power that the Constitution didn’t intend for them to have,” said Jamie Arango, an immigration attorney in Lincoln, Nebraska.
But in late April, an appellate court that includes New York ruled against the detention policy. The 6th and 11th circuits made similar decisions in May, creating a 3-2 split among the federal appellate courts that have issued rulings so far.
Maya King, the attorney for the Honduran man wrongly deported to Mexico, said she believes the government’s goal is to create a divide between the appellate courts so that the matter will have to be taken up by the Supreme Court.
In a statement, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that while “some judicial activists” have sought to thwart the administration’s changes, the agency has been vindicated by the Supreme Court before.
“DHS has the law and the facts on its side and will be vindicated on this issue too,” an agency spokesperson wrote.
Meanwhile, until the Supreme Court intervenes, the question of mandatory detention is pending before four other appellate courts, including the 10th Circuit, which covers Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming.
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR. There are many ways you can contact us with story ideas and leads, and you can find that information here. The Midwest Newsroom is a partner of The Trust Project. We invite you to review our ethics and practices here.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.
METHODOLOGY
Reporters Katie Moore and Luke Nozicka analyzed federal judges’ decisions in roughly 160 habeas corpus petitions regarding immigration detention filed by noncitizens held in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, the region covered by The Midwest Newsroom. The review included a search of closed cases, by court, on https://habeasdockets.org/ through mid-April. The reporters compiled information, including the case number, judge and the decision from the judge’s order. There were several types of outcomes, including release from detention, a bond hearing, or denial. Some cases were dismissed because the person was transferred to a different detention center or due to developments in their immigration case, among other reasons. Some individuals had more than one case. The analysis did not look at appeals filed in appellate courts. The reporters also interviewed numerous immigration attorneys to better understand how the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy is playing out in the Midwest.
RESOURCES
Habeas Dockets | Homepage
Tracking Habeas Cases | ProPublica, 2026
Special Immigrant Juveniles | U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2026
Herrera Avila v. Bondi et al | United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, 2026
Sections 1225 and 1226 of Title 8 of the U.S. Code | Cornell Law School
Habeas corpus definition | Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
TYPE OF ARTICLE News – Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
