The 5 biggest legal fights in the first year of Trump’s mass deportation push
Kilmar Abrego Garcia speaks to a crowd of people who held a prayer vigil and rally on his behalf outside the ICE building in Baltimore on Aug. 25, 2025. Lydia Walther Rodriguez with CASA interprets for him. (Photo by William J. Ford/Maryland Matters)
WASHINGTON — The first year of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House was defined by clashes with the judiciary branch, as the president and his administration pushed forward with an aggressive immigration agenda.
In the past year, the Trump administration has aimed to drastically change immigration policy in the United States, including by stripping millions of immigrants of their legal status and attempting to redefine the constitutional right of birthright citizenship.
The moves have often run directly against the judiciary branch.
Federal judges briefly stalled the Trump administration’s plans to deploy the National Guard in Portland, Oregon, for immigration enforcement. They also blocked the invocation of an archaic wartime law to expel immigrants from the country — a move that raised concerns, all the way up to the Supreme Court, about skirting the due process rights of immigrants.
In response, the president for the last year frequently battled with federal judges, such as in June, when the Justice Department sued all judges in federal court in Maryland over a two-day pause in deportations to ensure due process rights for immigrants.
Trump also fixated on certain judges that put his policies on hold, such as the District of Columbia’s Chief Judge James Emanuel Boasberg.
Boasberg blocked the Trump administration from deporting certain immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and ordered the return of deportation flights that, despite his restraining order, still landed at a brutal prison in El Salvador.
Trump’s singling out of Boasberg in late March, and calling for his impeachment, prompted a rare rebuke from conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
But the Supreme Court has often handed wins to the Trump administration on numerous emergency appeals. The high court allowed for deportations of immigrants to countries they have no ties to, referred to as third-country removals, and allowed the use of race in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
The president has found himself at odds with a range of groups in response to his harsh immigration policy.
A group of Quakers sued the Department of Homeland Security after officials removed a so-called sensitive locations policy that limited immigration enforcement in places of worship.
The Trump administration also faced backlash in its attempt to quickly deport Guatemalan children in the middle of the night, where a Trump nominated judge said the Department of Justice’s arguments for the move “crumbled like a house of cards.”
Out of the dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, here are the five most significant court cases related to the president’s immigration policies:
Alien Enemies Act
Last March, two deportation planes carrying immigrants removed under an 18th-century wartime law were ordered to return to the U.S. by Boasberg, chief judge for the District Court for the District of Columbia.
But the planes still landed in El Salvador, and 137 Venezuelan men were sent to a brutal prison known as CECOT after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The wartime law would apply to any Venezuelan national 14 and older who was suspected of being a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.
Boasberg then spent months probing whether Trump officials defied his order to turn the planes around. Last month, he concluded that the deportations were illegal and carried out in defiance of his order.
The 137 Venezuelan men were eventually released from CECOT last summer through a prisoner exchange. Boasberg determined that even though the men are no longer imprisoned, they still need to be afforded their due process rights and he ordered the Trump administration to propose a way to afford those due process rights.
In the latest major development, last month he directed the administration to create a plan on how to do that, such as providing some form of video interview before an immigration judge.
The Trump administration has argued because of the U.S. military operations to extract Venezuela’s president from the county, the situation is fluid, and they cannot provide a timeline for complying with Boasberg’s order from last month.
The Justice Department’s most recent filing, from Jan. 12, objects to the court’s order to facilitate remote due process hearings, and “given the current political instability in Venezuela, there is a serious risk of intentional interference with remote proceedings.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also submitted a Jan. 12 declaration to the court, saying that “introducing the matter of the disposition of the 137 class members into these discussions at this time would risk material damage to U.S. foreign policy interests in Venezuela.”
He added that the U.S. does not know where the 137 Venezuelan men are.
“Given the passage of time, the U.S. government does not know—nor does it have any way of knowing—the whereabouts of class members, including whether anyone has departed Venezuela or whether the regime subsequently took anyone back into custody,” Rubio said.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia
The wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and longtime Maryland man, cast a national spotlight on the president’s aggressive immigration crackdown.
Abrego Garcia’s case has highlighted the Trump administration’s appetite for mass deportations. The case started last March in the District Court of the District of Maryland, after Trump officials mistakenly removed Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, despite removal protections placed by an immigration judge in 2019 because it was likely Abrego Garcia would face violence if returned to his home country.
But in March, Abrego Garcia was placed on a plane, along with Venezuelans removed under the Alien Enemies Act, to the brutal El Salvador mega-prison known as CECOT.
Federal Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return, but the Trump administration took the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that it could not force another government to comply with the U.S.
The Supreme Court sided with Abrego Garcia, but stopped short of ordering his return.
Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. several months later to face a criminal indictment in Tennessee over allegations of human smuggling. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges, and another federal judge has found cause that the Justice Department brought the indictment in a vindictive move against Abrego Garcia.
Since his return, Abrego Garcia has detailed psychological and physical torture he experienced at CECOT. The Trump administration has also tried to remove him to a country to which he has no ties because of the 2019 removal protections.
Trump officials re-detained Abrego Garcia and have tried to remove him to the African nations of Eswatini, Ghana, Uganda and Liberia, despite Costa Rica’s willingness to accept Abrego Garcia as a refugee and his willingness to go.
For that reason, Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia’s release from an ICE facility in Pennsylvania and barred the Trump administration from re-detaining him.
She is currently overseeing Abrego Garcia’s challenge to his detention on the grounds that the Trump administration is using his imprisonment as punishment rather than for the purpose of removal.
A Jan. 14 hearing was the most recent development in Abrego Garcia’s case.
There, Xinis briefly conferred with his lawyers and Department of Justice attorneys regarding the timing of a final order of removal for Abrego Garcia was issued — the question was whether it was in 2019 or January 2025.
The timing of the order of removal could determine whether the Trump administration can re-detain Abrego Garcia for removal. Xinis in December ordered Abrego Garcia’s release, because she determined the Trump administration was unlawfully detaining him and said ICE failed repeatedly to show a final order of removal existed.
Xinis said she plans to make a final decision in Abrego Garcia’s case by Feb. 12.
Birthright Citizenship
One of Trump’s first executive orders he signed on Inauguration Day was ending the constitutional right to birthright citizenship.
Under birthright citizenship, all children born in the United States are considered citizens, regardless of their parents’ legal status. There is a small carve-out for the children born of diplomats.
If birthright citizenship were to be eliminated, more than 250,000 children born each year would not be granted U.S. citizenship and it would effectively create a class of 2.7 million stateless people by 2045, according to a recent study by the think tank the Migration Policy Institute.
In response to Trump’s executive order, multiple lawsuits were filed and lower courts across the country have granted preliminary injunctions against the order.
One of the challenges to birthright citizenship, brought by Democratic attorneys general, made its way to the Supreme Court, but the Trump administration asked the justices to weigh in on the issue of nationwide injunctions issued by lower courts, rather than the merits of birthright citizenship.
The justices decided on an order that limited nationwide injunctions, such as class action suits.
The merits of birthright citizenship are now before the Supreme Court, which is expected to hear oral arguments in February.
That birthright citizenship case is Barbara v. Trump, which stems from a case in New Hampshire. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to bar the executive order from taking effect against a class of babies born on or after Feb. 20, 2025. Those children would have been denied citizenship under the president’s executive order.
Lawmakers’ Access to ICE Facilities
As the Trump administration continues with aggressive immigration enforcement and detention, one of the few tools Democrats have, as the minority party, is oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities.
More than 60,000 immigrants are detained across various ICE facilities in the country, and Democrats argue they need access to conduct oversight at the facilities. Under a 2019 appropriations law, any lawmaker can carry out an unannounced visit at a federal facility that holds immigrants.
But after several Democrats were denied access to ICE facilities in July, due to a policy instituted by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that required seven days notice, a dozen House Democrats sued.
Last month, a federal judge granted the lawmakers’ request to stay the new policy by Noem. But after Minnesota lawmakers said they were denied an oversight visit to an ICE facility following a deadly shooting by an immigration officer in Minneapolis, Democrats were back in court Jan. 14.
Noem required a seven-day notice, nearly identical to the policy that initially prompted the suit from Democrats last year.
The federal judge handling the case, Jia Cobb, is probing whether the Trump administration has violated her court order.
Democrats who sued include: Joe Neguse of Colorado, Adriano Espaillat of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Robert Garcia of California, J. Luis Correa of California, Jason Crow of Colorado, Veronica Escobar of Texas, Dan Goldman of New York, Jimmy Gomez of California, Raul Ruiz of California, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Norma Torres of California.
Expanded Use of Expedited Removal
A pillar of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is the expanded use of expedited removal. The Trump policy allows the removal of immigrants through the interior of the country without an appearance before an immigration judge.
In March, immigration advocacy groups sued the Trump administration over the policy, arguing it stripped due process rights of immigrants.
In August, the District Court for the District of Columbia issued a stay in the policy, temporarily blocking the Trump administration from using it. The Department of Justice appealed, and in September a panel of appellate judges denied the Trump administration’s request to lift the lower courts’ stay.
Most recently, in December, the Trump administration defended the merits of its fast-track deportation policy before a panel of judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Department of Justice argued that immigrants who have been in the country for less than two years without legal authorization are not guaranteed due process.