Florida Fires Expose Violations Of Over 100 Court Orders By ICE, DOJ

from the flat-out-refusing-to-follow-the-law dept

The Trump administration continues to pretend migrants don’t have due process rights. It does this despite racking up nearly 10,000 rulings to the contrary — losing in roughly 90% of the petitions brought by ICE detainees.

While the Fifth Circuit continues to play coy about the 14th Amendment’s existence, the rest of nation’s courts have resoundingly made it clear that detainees are owed a bond hearing, rather than simply be expected to ride out an indefinite detention with zero options until the administration finds some random country to dump them in.

With ICE and a compliant DOJ doing everything they can to prevent detainees from filing habeus corpus motions — using methods ranging from shuffling detainees from state to state to deny them standing to multiple purges of DOJ attorneys who aren’t sufficiently loyal to Trump — lots of judges aren’t actually seeing the entirety of the administration’s illegal actions. The administration is “flooding the zone” to create a “fog of war” in a way that’s as inelegant and brutish as my mixed metaphor.

But the administration can’t stop acts of God from exposing what ICE and the DOJ would have preferred remained hidden. Brush fires in Miami-Dade County forced the evacuation of an ICE detention facility. And that let a judge handling cases in that jurisdiction see clearly exactly how many times the administration had flouted direct court orders.

[The fires] opened a can of worms in federal court after a federal judge was notified that 47 of those detainees were shipped outside the Southern District of Florida in direct violation of court orders. When Miami-based Judge Michael Moore was alerted to the 47 violations, he ordered a deeper look into how often ICE had violated similar court orders in recent months.

The answer alarmed him, and prompted him to respond with force in a hearing on Thursday morning.

Attorneys at the Department of Justice alerted Moore that an estimated 116 detainees have recently been removed from South Florida in direct violation of court orders, a significant increase from the original 47 number. Some of those violations were never reported to the court until Moore started asking.

While Judge Moore understood the fires might mean moving detained migrants to other locations, the government was supposed to inform the court if it attempted to move people with pending petitions out of the court’s jurisdiction. This never happened. And it was happening even before wildfires created this crisis. According to the judge, the DOJ and ICE had done this previously, including one case where the judge wasn’t informed of a relocation until the date of the hearing, which was weeks after the court had told the government to bring this migrant to a bond hearing.

Moore’s takedown of the administration occurred before a packed house of observers, including dozens of interns and federal court clerks. And Moore lit them up:

“I don’t want you to hide behind the brushfire, because there are cases that didn’t have to do with the brushfire,” Moore told ICE and DOJ attorneys. “There have been a number of transfers over the previous months that had nothing to do with the brushfires.”

He noted that some detainees not only had been moved to other states, but some have been “removed from the United States” in direct violation of court orders.

The law is settled (at least for the moment) in this circuit. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court ruled two months ago that the government had to provide bond hearings to all detained migrants — something that has always been the case prior to this administration’s refusal to respect the Constitution.

This is how the administration wants to play it, which meant the judge had minimal patience for the DOJ lawyer caught up in the middle of this mess.

Matthew Feely, the DOJ attorney on the case, apologized for the court order violations and said the Southern District of Florida’s office has been overwhelmed with habeus corpus petitions, stemming from the Department of Homeland Security’s stance that it does not have to offer bond hearing to immigrant detainees. 

[…]

In 2022, there were only 23 habeus corpus petitions filed in the district, he said. In 2023 there were 31. But between June of 2025 and July 10, 2026, there were about 1,800 petitions filed.

At the same time, Feely said the amount of attorneys handling civil cases in the Southern District of Florida has plummeted by 40% since last year.

“We’re struggling here, your honor,” said Feely, while adding that the DOJ is trying to hire to fill the vacant positions.

“I’m sympathetic, but it looks like a crisis of your own making,” responded Moore, who was appointed to the court by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “If you didn’t advance these legal theories you would not be getting sued.”

There it is. This administration does not follow court precedent. It does not respect the Constitution. It makes up its own rules that are completely unsupported by case law. Then it fires everyone who won’t assist the administration with its dirty work. 1,800 petitions in a single federal district, being handled by a DOJ office that has seen 40% of its workforce resign or get fired for refusing to play by Trump’s rules. And as court orders continue to pile up, the administration still refuses to comply with them.

It’s an unmitigated good that this played out in the open. The problem that hasn’t been addressed is how you rein in a rogue regime that deliberately ignores a co-equal branch of the government. Courts need to start considering their options, including this one:

In cases where federal marshals fail to act to enforce court orders (or contempt of court findings), courts can turn to state and local law enforcement agencies.

Federal judges have the authority to deputize state law enforcement officers to carry out federal court orders, particularly in cases of contempt or defiance by federal officials. State attorneys general, governors, and local sheriffs can be called upon to enforce judicial rulings.

The usual stuff isn’t working. Extreme measures are needed. The question is whether anyone in the court system — or in state law enforcement — has the will to get this done.

Filed Under: 14th amendment, doj, due process, florida, ice, mass deportation, matthew feely, trump administration