The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minnesota is pushing the United States court system to its breaking point.

Since Operation Metro Surge began in December, federal immigration agents have arrested some 4,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The result is an avalanche of cases filed in the US district court in Minnesota on behalf of people challenging their imprisonment by federal immigration enforcement agents. According to WIRED’s review of court records and official judicial statistics, attorneys filed nearly as many so-called habeas corpus petitions in Minnesota alone as were filed across the US during an entire year.

The bombardment of cases filed in federal court in Minnesota and other states is the result of two Trump administration policies: a dramatic increase in the number of people being detained, and the elimination of a key legal mechanism for securing their release. The result is a US court system in collapse: Judges, immigration attorneys, and federal prosecutors are all overwhelmed, while the people at the center of these cases remain behind bars, often in states thousands of miles from their home—many after judges have ordered their release.

“I’ve never said the word habeas so many times in my life,” says Graham Ojala-Barbour, a Minnesota immigration attorney who has been practicing for over a decade. Ojala-Barbour says that when he goes to sleep, his dreams are about habeas petitions.

Exhaustion is endemic. On February 3, one now-former special assistant US attorney, Julie Le, begged a US judge in Minnesota to hold her in contempt so she could finally rest. She was listed on 88 cases, according to data obtained via PACER, the US court records database. Daniel Rosen, the US attorney for the district of Minnesota and head of Le’s office, previously told that judge in a letter that they were “struggling to keep up with the immense volume” of petitions and had let at least one court order demanding the return of a petitioner slip through the cracks. Le did not respond to a request for comment. In response to a request for comment, the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office sent an automatic reply stating that they currently lacked a public information officer.

Le was reportedly fired after the February hearing, where she told the judge, “This job sucks.”

In response to a request for comment, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, “The Trump administration is more than prepared to handle the legal caseload necessary to deliver President Trump’s deportation agenda for the American people.”

As hard as the workload may be for US attorneys, the situation is far more dire for people detained by immigration authorities. In court filings, people who have been detained describe being packed into cells that were so full that they couldn’t even sit down before being flown to detention centers in Texas. One described having to share cells with people who were sick with Covid. Others said agents repeatedly pressured them and other detainees to self-deport.

McLaughlin told WIRED, “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. All detainees receive full due process.”

Ana Voss, the civil division chief for the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office, has been listed as one of the attorneys defending the government in nearly all the habeas petition cases filed in Minnesota since Operation Metro Surge began. Before December, the majority of cases associated with Voss were about other issues, such as social security and disability lawsuits. Since then, habeas petitions for immigrant detainees have dramatically overtaken all other matters.

In January, 584 of the 618 cases filed in Minnesota district court that included Voss as an appearing attorney were categorized as habeas petitions for detainees, according to a WIRED review of PACER data. This is likely an undercount due to incorrect “nature of suit” labels. Voss is no longer with the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office, according to an automatic reply from her Department of Justice email address.

The number of habeas petitions filed has exploded in other parts of the country as well. In the western district court of Texas, for example, at least 774 petitions were filed in the month of January, according to data collected by Habeas Dockets. In the Middle District of Georgia, 186 petitions were filed that same month. ProPublica reported that across the country, there have been over 18,000 habeas cases filed since January 2025.

Last year, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts said that between April 2024 and the end of March 2025, attorneys had filed just 618 habeas petitions for noncitizen detainees throughout the entire federal court system.

Several factors have contributed to the rise in habeas cases, according to attorneys who have represented both the federal government and detainees.

One is that there are simply far more people in detention than there ever have been. Over 70,000 people are in detention as of January 25, according to the most recent available data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Toward the end of the Biden administration, there were less than 15,000. Sarah Wilson, an attorney who previously worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, says that increases in habeas petition cases tend to track with increases in the number of people detained.

The Trump administration has also pushed a new interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act that departs from decades of case law and expands the categories of people being detained without parole. Previously, undocumented immigrants who had been living in the country for several years were typically given a bond hearing in front of an immigration judge. Those judges were supposed to weigh the facts of a detainee’s case, including their criminal history and relative flight risk, and make a decision about their release while their cases were pending.

That is no longer the case. Now, Wilson says, filing a habeas petition “really has become the only avenue for restoring that right to a bond hearing that had previously existed.”

McLaughlin told WIRED, “It should come as no surprise that more habeas petitions are being filed by illegal aliens—especially after many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.”

On February 6, the Fifth Circuit of Appeals ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s new legal interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That ruling may complicate many detainees’ path to a bond hearing, since the majority of detainees are currently being held in detention facilities in Texas, where the Fifth Circuit’s ruling applies.

Ojala-Barbour, the Minnesota immigration attorney, says that habeas petition cases are typically filed in the district court where a detainee is currently located. WIRED found more than two dozen habeas petition cases originally filed in Minnesota that were transferred to different courts. In at least two instances, the government argued that cases should be transferred to Texas courts because a petitioner had been moved to a detention facility there. McLaughlin said that ICE makes custody determinations based on bed space.

Despite the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, hundreds of cases in other jurisdictions have resulted in rulings against the government’s new position. The chief judge for the Middle District of Georgia has referred to the volume of petitions as an “administrative judicial emergency.”

In addition to defending the government in habeas petition cases, US attorneys are also supposed to ensure that the government complies with any court orders that result from those cases, including orders to release and return petitioners to their home states. When these attorneys fail to enforce court orders because they are overwhelmed or underprepared, it can mean that people remain in detention for longer than they should be.

In the February court hearing about the government’s noncompliance with court orders in five separate cases, Judge Jerry Blackwell said, “When court orders are not followed, it’s not just the Court’s authority that’s at issue. It is the rights of individuals in custody and the integrity of the constitutional system itself.”

Le, the former special assistant US attorney in Minnesota, told the judge that she had volunteered to help the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office with habeas petition cases, but described a messy onboarding process that seems to have left her underprepared to handle the dozens of habeas petitions she was assigned.

Le conceded to the judge that she hadn’t received proper orientation or training, and had to figure out what to do on the job. She said that she had been working for a month before she finally received an employee badge and was still having trouble accessing her new work email. Court records show she had been added to cases before she was admitted to practice in Minnesota, and someone else had to file briefs on her behalf.

Before she started at the US Attorney’s Office, Le said, she worked at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor. It’s hard to underscore how different being an attorney at OPLA versus the USAO’s office can be. OPLA attorneys represent DHS in front of the immigration judges at DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review–not federal judges, who are in another branch of government entirely. Cases in immigration court are considered less formal, internal proceedings, where government attorneys get a lot of deference. Experts described the standards of evidence for federal court as much higher.

Le told the judge that trying to get ICE to comply with court orders was like pulling teeth.

Now, Le is reportedly no longer with the USAO’s office. Voss is also gone. Voss’ automatic reply identified David Fuller as the new point of contact for civil chief inquiries. In February, Fuller started being added to habeas petition cases in a similar manner to how Voss was. As of February 10, PACER data lists Fuller as an attorney in 183 habeas petition cases that were filed so far in February, double the amount of cases he is listed as appearing in that were filed during the entire month of January.

Additional reporting by Matt Giles.