The man walked around the corner of the coral pink detention center building, shuffling a little to keep his shoes on his feet. They’d taken his shoelaces. And his belt.
The 93-degree temperature bounced off the black asphalt as he walked free for the first time in six weeks, after federal immigration agents in California arrested him at a routine court check-in with his American citizen wife.
A year ago, he might have been one of a dozen men released on a day like this.
But a few months ago, the releases from the privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center here slowed to maybe five a day.
Now, releases from the approximately 1,200-bed GEO ICE facility have slowed even further as the Trump administration clamps down on people accused of living illegally in the United States.
A new policy rolling out nationally prevents judges from granting a bond to most detained migrants. Those hearings often end with a judge releasing the detainee if they agree to post a cash bond, and in some cases, be tracked by a GPS device.
The White House argues that mass migration under former President Joe Biden was legally an “invasion,” and it has invoked both the language and tools of war to close the borders and remove people who thought they entered the country illegally.
“The Biden administration allowed violent gang members, rapists, and murderers into our country, under the guise of asylum, where they unleashed terror on Americans,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a July 12 press briefing. “Under President Trump, we are putting American citizens first.”
Statistics show that migrants are far less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. And federal statistics show that fewer than half of detained migrants have criminal records.
But because immigration court is run by the Department of Justice and is not an independent judiciary, people within that system aren’t entitled to the same protections ‒ including the right to a speedy trial, a public defender if they can’t afford their own attorney, or now, a bond hearing, according to the administration. For detainees, bond often ranges from $5,000-$20,000, immigration attorneys said.
Migrant rights advocates say the loss of bond hearings means detainees will increasingly have to fight their deportation cases without legal representation or support and advice from community members. In many cases, detainees are being shipped to holding facilities thousands of miles from home, advocates say.
Contesting deportation can take months, and migrant rights groups said they suspect the policy change is intended to pressure migrants into agreeing to be deported even if they have a solid legal case for remaining in the United States.
The Trump administration has not publicly released the policy change; advocates said they first read about it in The Washington Post on July 14. Others said they learned of the policy change when DOJ attorneys read portions of it to judges during bond hearings.
“The Trump administration’s decision to deny bond hearings to detained immigrants is a cruel and calculated escalation of its mass detention agenda, one that prioritizes incarceration over due process and funnels human beings into for-profit prison corporations,” said Karen Orona, the communications manager at the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. “This move eliminates a lifeline for thousands of immigrants, stripping away their right to reunite with families, gather evidence, and fairly fight their cases.”
Out of all of the people detained at the facility, only one man was released on July 15. And like every person released, a volunteer team from the nonprofit Casa de Paz met him on the street outside. They offered him a ride, a cell phone call, and food.
Andrea Loya, the nonprofit’s executive director, said Casa volunteers have seen the Trump administration’s get-tough approach playing out as they speak with those who are released. Like other migrant rights advocates, Loya said she’s frustrated that private prison companies with close ties to the White House benefit financially from the new policy.
“It does not surprise me that this is the route we’re headed down,” she said. “Now, what we can expect is to see almost no releases.”
ICE previously lacked the detention space to hold every person accused of crossing the border outside of official ports of entry, which in 2024 totaled 2.1 million “encounters.” The new July 4 federal spending bill provides ICE with funding for 80,000 new detention beds, allowing it to detain up to 100,000 people at any given time, in addition to funding an extra 10,000 ICE agents to make arrests.
Because there historically hasn’t been enough detention space to hold every person accused of immigration violations, millions of people over the years have been released into the community following a bond hearing in which an immigration judge weighed the likelihood of them showing back up for their next court date. They are then free to live their lives and work ‒ legally or not‒ while their deportation cases remain pending, which can take years.
According to ICE’s 2024 annual report, there were more than 7.6 million people on what it calls the “non-detained” docket ‒ people accused of violating immigration law but considered not enough of a threat to keep locked up. The agency had been attaching GPS monitors to detainees who judges considered a low risk of violence but a higher risk of failing to return to court.
Each detention costs taxpayers $152 per person, every day, compared to $4.20 a day for GPS tracking, ICE data shows.
According to the incarceration-rights group Vera Institute of Justice, 92% of people ordered to show up for immigration court hearings do so.
“We know that detention is not just cruel but is unnecessary,” said Elizabeth Kenney, Vera’s associate director. “The government’s justification of detention is just not supported by research or even their own data.”
Like many migrant rights advocates, Kenney said she has not yet seen the specific policy.
In Seattle, attorney Tahmina Watson of Watson Immigration Law, said the policy ‒ the specifics of which she had also not seen ‒ appeared to be part of ongoing administration efforts to limit due process for anyone accused of immigration violations.
“They have created a system in which they can detain people longer and longer,” said Watson. “Effectively, this means that people who have potential pathways to legality are being held indefinitely. The whole notion is to put people into detention. And I don’t know where that’s going to end.”
