Lawfare Daily: The Thousands of Lawsuits Challenging Pres. Trump’s Mandatory Alien Detention Policy

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4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

Kyle Cheney, senior legal affairs reporter for Politico, speaks to Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff about the thousands of habeas corpus cases he has pored through challenging a Trump administration policy requiring mandatory detention for most detained aliens.

They discuss how judges have ruled on these cases, the degree to which those rulings do or don’t correlate with political expectations, the appellate prospects for such cases, and why they haven’t been resolved by class action.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's about 350 or so judges that have ruled against this interpretation and varying degrees.
0:09.0	And I think some acknowledge there are nuances, there are complications.
0:12.0	It's not a totally frivolous position for the administration.
0:15.0	And there's some that just say it doesn't even pass the common sense test.
0:19.0	You know, this is so far of a distortion of law.
0:22.5	It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Roger Parloff, senior editor at Lawfare, and I'm with Kyle Cheney, senior legal affairs reporter for Politico.
0:33.2	In the thousands, now at this point, I'm sure it's tens of thousands of cases that have cropped up under this issue of mandatory detention.
0:42.3	Almost invariably, it's people with either low-level criminal history, you know, parking violation, traffic violations, or misdemeanor type things, or none at all.
0:52.2	And increasingly we're seeing people who even had lawful
0:54.9	status get roped up and people who are refugees. Today we're talking about thousands of lawsuits
1:00.6	across the country triggered by a Trump administration policy instituted last July that purports
1:07.7	to deprive the vast majority of detained aliens the opportunity for bail.
1:13.9	So, Kyle, you've been all over a terribly important story that more than any other reporter I'm aware of
1:22.1	that you've written maybe four or five articles about.
1:27.0	It's an issue that's generated thousands of
1:30.1	cases relating to the detention of aliens caught up in the immigration crackdown.
1:40.5	And as I understand it, the Trump administration's position now is that the vast majority of these people are not eligible for bail, no matter how long they've lived here, while their cases are playing out, no longer how long they've lived here, or how peacefully or how productively or how many children,
2:03.2	U.S. citizens they have or grandchildren. Where does this start? How did we get here?
2:09.2	Sure. So you hit it on the head. I mean, this is a very complicated issue that
2:14.2	it still hurts my head when I try to parse every little nuance of it, but it
2:19.2	essentially boils down to what you just said. This is that for the last 30 years or more,
2:25.5	there's been a sort of understanding in the immigration law, which itself is pretty complicated
	...

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