Tracking Government Non-Compliance in Habeas Corpus Cases

Methodology

The data assembled represents every immigration habeas case we have identified since the beginning of the second Trump administration in which the government failed to comply with a court order. Note that the dataset counts cases in which court orders were violated, not the number of violations or the number of court orders the government violated. Many of the cases encompass multiple violations.

The cases are drawn from a number of different sources: press coverage has identified a number of cases; cases sometimes cite one another; as described above, some judges have compiled lists of violated orders in their districts; and one judge in New Jersey ordered the government to self-report its own violations. In addition to these cases, we used Anthropic’s Claude to write programs to scour every docket available on Courtlistener for every federal court in the country for cases that appeared similar to those in which violations had occurred. After Claude identified a large volume of cases, our human analysts examined each case to determine whether or not to include it in the dataset. No case is included in this database without a human judgment that a judge had found a violation of a court order.

While we have included any number of violations that may seem trivial, we have also excluded a lot of cases where judges have identified genuine governmental misconduct or become upset by government arguments. For example, in many cases around the country, the government has infuriated judges by raising issues rejected in dozens of similar cases. In some instances, this has led to threats of sanctions. We have excluded all such cases on grounds that they are not violations of specific court orders. This is not, we emphasize, a list of cases in which the government’s conduct has been deficient or has annoyed judges. It is a list of cases in which a court has ordered something specific and that order was not fully followed.

Definitions: 

• Where the government has been ordered to file a document and has failed to do so, such as a response to a habeas petition, we categorized that as a “failure to file” and a violation of the court order. Where, by contrast, there is no specific order to file a particular document and the government effectively defaults the case or an argument by failing to file a response, we do not consider that a “failure to file” in violation of an order, just a default or a waiver of the argument.
• Where the government is ordered to release a detainee and file a document confirming the release and it fails to file the confirmation, we consider that a “failure to timely release” unless there is evidence that the release itself happened. In this latter situation, we do not treat such cases as “failure to timely release,” only as a “failure to file.” In a number of cases, there are documents listed on the docket but unavailable to the public that may clarify that a detainee was, in fact, timely released about whom no such evidence was previously available. We reserve the right to change categorizations if and when such material becomes public.
• Similarly, in situations in which a detainee was transferred out of a judicial district despite a court order to keep the detainee local, it is not always clear when the order issued relative to the transfer. We have treated these cases as reflecting a “transfer despite order” unless it is clear that the court order post-dated the transfer. In some instances, again, documents unavailable on the public docket might shed light on this question. We reserve the right to update records as more material becomes public.