More than a year and a half into President Donald Trump’s second term, immigration attorneys critical of the administration say political pressure has transformed immigration courts across the country from neutral arbiters to a de facto “deportation machine.” Supporters of stricter immigration laws say that’s by design.

The clearest indication of this transformation is seen in the way immigration judges are handling requests for bond. An analysis of data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review reviewed by LAist shows that immigration judges nationwide are granting fewer bond requests. The judges denied about 43% of bond requests in 2025, up from about 36% in 2024, according to the data. The denial rate continued to rise, reaching about 55% in the first three months of 2026.

This shift is especially visible at the immigration court at Adelanto, the privately run detention facility about 90 miles northeast of downtown L.A. in San Bernardino County. Between Jan. 1, 2024, and Nov. 10, 2025, immigration judges there denied about 39% of bond requests, the data analysis shows. Since Nov. 10, 2025, Adelanto judges have denied just over 57% of bond requests.

Nov. 10 marks an inflection point in the data that immigration attorneys based in Southern California have tied to an internal email containing new instructions to immigration judges. They’ve filed a lawsuit seeking unredacted versions of emails after a Freedom of Information Act request returned messages with the contents redacted.

Federal officials returned almost entirely redacted emails in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by advocates for immigrants.

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One in a series of redacted emails returned following a Freedom of Information Act request filed by advocates for immigrants.

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When bonds are granted, the data shows the amount set in each case is thousands of dollars higher than before — a big change for detainees who often have limited resources. Again, Adelanto saw an especially large shift. Nationally, median bond amounts increased from $7,500 between Jan. 1, 2024, and Nov. 10, 2025, to $9,211 after that date. At Adelanto, the median is now $10,000.

As a result, people are sitting in detention while their immigration cases move through the system. The analysis of federal data concluded that favorable results of appeals decided on merits, meaning results that favor the immigrant appealing their deportation orders, are “essentially zero.”

The change in the bond adjudication follows a series of instructions from the administration to immigration judges, including a September 2025 decision issued by the Board of Immigration Appeals, or BIA, to deny bond hearings to the vast majority of people who entered the country illegally.

Trump officials have argued this direction complies with federal immigration law. The Department of Justice, which houses the Executive Office For Immigration Review, responded to LAist’s request for comment with an unsigned email statement.

“The Executive Office for Immigration Review is restoring integrity to the immigration adjudication system, and Board of Immigration Appeals decisions reflect straightforward interpretations of clear statutory language,” the statement said, in part.

“The argument that Trump 2 makes is that, for the first time in 30 years, we are applying the law as Congress wrote it,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization that says it advocates a “pro-immigrant, low immigration” stance.

Immigration advocates disagree. They say the current administration has abdicated the responsibility to make fair and impartial decisions about an individual’s right to stay in the United States or be deported.

Stacy Tolchin, an immigration attorney based in Pasadena, is part of a group of attorneys using federal immigration court data in habeas corpus filings, which challenge the legality of continued detentions.

“The laws are dictated to be fair and consider people's circumstances, how long they've been here, whether they've committed crimes, whether they pay taxes, have any family ties here,” Tolchin said. “They're complicated and they're meant to consider all of these equities, and we're just losing consideration of all of that.”

One case among more than 360,000 

Hundreds of people protested conditions at the Adelanto Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center in San Bernardino County in March.

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In Trump’s second term, his administration’s wave of immigration enforcement includes more than 360,000 new immigration court cases initiated in the 2026 fiscal year, as of May, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering and research organization at Syracuse University.

Immigration cases can be complex and take years to fully adjudicate, even after an individual has received removal orders from an immigration judge.

As the volume of immigration cases has increased, so too has the volume of bond requests. Those requests more than doubled from 34,845 in 2024 to 80,130 in 2025, according to Executive Office for Immigration Review data. As the volume rose, the data shows the rate of approval declined nationally, especially at Adelanto.

Israel Uriarte had lived in the U.S. for 33 years when immigration officers arrested him in January in his longtime Cypress Park neighborhood. The 70-year-old street vendor has no criminal record. Two of his children and his brother are U.S. citizens. He is trying to gain legal status through his family ties.

Not long ago, immigration attorneys say, people like Uriarte — someone with deep roots, no record and family in the country — would have almost certainly been released on bond. That has changed.

“He’s very hard working,” said Uriarte’s 33-year-old daughter, Karla Robles, who spoke on behalf of her father. “The community knows him as the street man around here because he’s always working, and if you catch him outside, he’s never in a bad mood. I mean, at least you’ll never notice it because he always says good morning to everyone he sees.”

Three times, Uriarte asked an immigration judge at Adelanto to release him on bond while his case moved through the courts. Three times, Judge Patrick C. Barrett said no.

Officials with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which is based in Los Angeles and represents day laborers and migrants, said they noticed their clients were struggling to get released on bond at the end of last year.

According to immigration advocates, the practice of denying bond requests puts pressure on people to give up on fighting their cases and accept deportation.

“There's two sides of it,” said Caleb Soto, a workers’ rights director for the organizing network. “You either are railroaded into giving up your rights or you're let to sit there for as long as you can stomach being in these facilities, which have horrific conditions.”

Soto said he could think of at least two cases where clients gave up their cases and accepted voluntary deportation, but that outcome is probably much higher among individuals who don’t have access to legal representation.

How we got here

President Trump ran on a platform promising to deport millions of people from the U.S. Last summer, masked ICE officers were out in force in L.A. before wide-scale operations in Minneapolis and Chicago made international headlines. By then, changes were underway in immigration courts.

At the core of this change is a September 2025 ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which held that people who entered the country illegally are subject to mandatory detention and that immigration judges lack authority to hold bond hearings.

“When you’re talking about individuals who have entered illegally, they have already shown they are willing to violate the law to remain in the United States,” said Arthur, of the Center for Immigration Studies. “In my opinion the statute clearly mandates their detention.”

Prior to that, the law was interpreted to mean that detention was discretionary, meaning an immigration judge could choose to hold a bond hearing and release individuals who could prove they were not a danger to the community and were not a flight risk.

District Court Judge Sunshine S. Sykes of the Central District of California vacated the September decision this past February, but the government appealed the orders and the Ninth Circuit issued a stay pending appeal in March. Immigration attorneys said they expect the case to land before the Supreme Court later this year. Until then, that leaves people in every jurisdiction but California’s Central District, where Sykes’ decision was issued, subject to mandatory detention.

Mandatory detention reverses decades of precedent and violates fundamental rights to due process, according to Chloe Dillon and other immigration attorneys.

Dillon now heads San Mateo County’s criminal immigration defense for the Private Defender Program. Before that, she was an immigration judge in San Francisco — a court the Trump administration effectively shut down when it fired her and other judges there.

“It’s not just that, they cannot get bond, not just that they will ultimately not be released,” Dillon said, “but that they can’t even have a hearing on whether or not they should be released, where they could present facts and say, 'This is why I think I should be released.'”

Dillon said the Executive Office for Immigration Review data shows the impact of policy changes like this.

“I don’t think that it is a stretch to say that this administration has said in writing what their objectives were,” said Dillon, who had a rate of approving asylum requests more than 90% of the time. “I also think that there’s an argument that this is what they at least believe they were elected to — whether that is true or not — which is to deport as many people as possible.”

What changed in November? 

In March 2026, Angelenos journeyed to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in the Mojave Desert to protest conditions at the facility. Before leaving, they created an altar for immigrants who've recently died in custody.

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The analysis of Executive Office for Immigration Review data shows a clear inflection point in November 2025 when bond releases became rarer in immigration courts across the country.

Attorneys with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said they noticed this shift at Adelanto almost immediately, before the data was released.

“We were seeing from one week to the next, this jump, this complete change in how immigration courts and immigration judges were deciding and issuing bonds,” said Lauren Michel Wilfong, a lawyer with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

In early December, the network filed a Freedom of Information Act request after hearing that immigration judges at Adelanto and other immigration courts received guidance instructing them to justify any granted bond requests to their superior in writing.

In response to the FOIA request, the Executive Office for Immigration Review turned over a series of emails from mid-November. Those emails are almost entirely redacted. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network then filed a lawsuit, with representation by Tolchin, in January seeking to compel the Trump administration to release unredacted emails. That case is yet to be decided.

Wilfong said the intent of the lawsuit is to “expose the current policies and practices of immigration courts and how decisions are made.”

She said they want the unredacted records because they believe “this document will show, or at least show in part, the fundamental unfairness of how these decisions are being made.”

Soto said he has seen immigration judges pause bond determination hearings to seek guidance from the federal government about bond amounts.

“They essentially negotiate that,” Soto said. “That just seems so bizarre, and like we’re saying, describes a system that doesn’t actually confer any rights to the person that is sitting there in that room.”

Unlike federal and state court judges, immigration judges are employed by the Department of Justice and can be reassigned or fired. Former immigration judges said this means they are less independent than other types of judges. An August 2025 memo issued by the DOJ cautions that “independence and impartiality" was “not a license to ignore a clear directive from a proper appellate authority.” The memo goes on to say if a judge’s record was found to be an outlier it could indicate “systematic bias or failure to adhere to applicable law that warrants close examination and potential action.”

“That’s a problem,” Soto said. “It’s like an outside system under the DOJ that theoretically is supposed to be separate, civil, non-criminal, is really having these incredible life-altering consequences, and it has less due process than almost any other court that I’ve ever seen.”

Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, who served as an immigration judge in York, Pennsylvania, said that’s “a fixture, not a bug of the system.”

“[Immigration judges] work for the Attorney General and the Attorney General sets the rules,” said Arthur.

District court intervention in Uriarte’s case

Like others detained by ICE, Uriarte, the L.A. street vendor arrested in January, looked outside immigration court for help.

Barrett, the immigration judge at Adelanto, initially denied Uriarte’s request for a bond hearing Feb. 17. He cited the September 2025 Board of Immigration Appeals opinion stating that people who entered the country illegally are not eligible for a hearing.

Federal judge John D. Early ordered the immigration court to hold a bond hearing for Uriarte on Feb. 27 because his case is in the Central District of California and, therefore, subject to the partial stay on the BIA decision.

At that February hearing, Barrett determined Uriarte could not prove he was not a flight risk and denied his bond request for three reasons: That Uriarte entered the country illegally in 1992, that he worked without proper authorization and because his brother (a U.S. citizen) was not a valid sponsor.

Tolchin represented Uriarte as he filed a habeas corpus petition April 7, arguing that Barrett did not deny his bond request for valid reasons.

Intervention like this has become common under Trump’s second administration, as an unprecedented wave of habeas corpus filings — nearly 60,000 since January 2025 — has hit federal courts across the country. According to data gathered by ProPublica and analyzed by LAist, the annual average over the previous 15 years was fewer than 1,000.

Dillon, the former San Francisco immigration judge, said that while the federal data shows immigration judges are releasing fewer people on bond, the data doesn’t capture cases like Uriarte’s where bond releases only happened because of intervention by another court — including by judges in what she called “deep red pockets of the United States who have ruled that a bond hearing is necessary for fairness and due process.”

“The data does not show the people who only got bond hearings because a federal court judge ordered them to get a bond hearing,” she said, “that would otherwise not have gotten a bond hearing if it was left to the administration alone without the intervention of a federal judge who works for the federal judiciary.”

Robles said her father began to contemplate ending his case and accepting deportation to Mexico shortly after his second bond request was denied.

“I remember that night, and he said, 'There is nothing that I have to go to, no one that I can go to. I would be stepping out of what was familiar into something unknown because it's been over 30 years, everything has changed,’” Robles said.

Early granted Uriarte’s petition on April 14 and ordered Adelanto to release Uriarte or give him another bond hearing. Early said a new hearing must comply with federal law by considering the unique circumstances of Uriarte’s case.

On April 21, Barrett, held another bond hearing and denied it again.

“They kept denying him for [being a] flight risk, which is ridiculous because we provided all the courts enough information and proof that we wanted to try if there was any way to adjust his status,” said Robles of her father’s case.

In June, Early determined Uriarte’s previous bond hearings did not comply with federal law and ordered ICE to release him from Adelanto. In his decision, Early wrote that the court violated his rights to due process by relying on the fact that he came to the country illegally and worked without authorization, since that logic would lead to an automatic denial of bond in all cases, since those factors are true for anyone with an ongoing immigration case.

In his decision, Early quoted another case that found such an automatic denial “fails to comport with due process.”

Early ordered Uriarte’s release from detention June 2. Robles said the court date for Uriarte’s immigration case has been postponed until 2028. He is required to check in with ICE until then.

“I still at times have trouble grasping the fact that he’s actually released and here with us,” Robles said, ”because I know there're many families that unfortunately don’t have the same circumstances.”