AMY GOODMAN: Coming up, we’re going to look at the breaking news. Andrew, formerly known as Prince Andrew, has been arrested on his 66th birthday. This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh. But first this.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: A major investigation by Reuters has found hundreds of judges around the U.S. have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully. Reuters reports “The decisions amount to a sweeping legal rebuke of Trump’s immigration crackdown.” But the administration has continued jailing people indefinitely even after courts ruled the policy was illegal. This comes as the number of people in ICE detention has reached about 68,000 this month. That is a 75% increase from when Trump took office last year.

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined now by Brad Heath, enterprise reporter for Reuters. He co-wrote the article Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped.. Brad, lay out this exposé.

BRAD HEATH: We’ve been looking at cases in which people detained by the government during the immigration crackdown have come to court and said, “I am being held illegally. You are required to give me at least an opportunity to be out on bond while the government is trying to deport me.” That’s something that for almost 30 years the government has done pretty consistently. But starting last summer, the Trump Administration made a big push to try to keep everybody locked up while these cases were going on. We found 4,421 cases involving more than 400 judges who said these detentions are illegal. The government can’t just deny people bond and hold them indefinitely in this way.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Brad, what has been the response to this exposé?

BRAD HEATH: Things have kind of kept on as they’re keeping on and the number of lawsuits coming into the federal courts is just piling up and up. It’s a pretty striking number. There were 20,000 when last I looked and I think the pace is actually accelerating. Now, there has been some action. There was a federal judge in California yesterday who tried to block the administration’s policy of just denying people bond globally. We’ll see what effect that has. But so far, these court orders saying this policy is illegal have not caused the administration to change it.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about 18-year-old high school student Joseph Thomas from Venezuela. What happened to him? What did the judge rule?

BRAD HEATH: He’s a Venezuelan. He and his father were both asylum seekers. They have been in the country since 2023. They were arrested after a traffic stop. They both have work authorizations. They were doing a delivery run for Walmart, I think. The government denied both of them the opportunity to be released so they filed lawsuits along with tens of thousands of others at this point. Two separate judges ruled that the government had to release them. So both have since gone home. But to get there, they had to go through this process of obtaining a lawyer and going to federal court, which is not how it used to work.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Brad, could you talk about the impact of this flood of lawsuits on the functioning of the overall judicial system?

BRAD HEATH: It has really been quite striking. We saw a little bit of it crack into the public view a couple of weeks ago when a DOJ attorney just complained to a judge about how bad the system was and how she wished she could be held in contempt so she could get 24 hours of rest. But the pile-up of these cases is like nothing the Justice Department was equipped to handle. We found 700 DOJ lawyers who have been assigned to these cases, including people who have been pulled off of criminal prosecutions. There are some lawyers whose name has ended up on more than 1,000 civil lawsuits just since October. That’s a really hard caseload to keep up with. One of the upshots of the government being so swamped with this is when courts are actually ordering that this detainee be released, the government is having a hard time making that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk also about the droves of lawyers who have left the Justice Department? Also talk about the lawyer who recently said in court—lost her job—but she just said, “This job sucks.”

BRAD HEATH: Right, she doesn’t have the job anymore. This would be a challenge I think for DOJ at any time, even with a fully staffed Justice Department. We saw some records last year that about 2,900 attorneys left the Justice Department through mid-November 2025—some people taking the fork-in-the-road early retirement, a lot of people just resigning, hundreds just being fired, I think. The civil division in Minneapolis, for example, that would normally take on these cases, where hundreds and hundreds have been filed, is down 50%. And the U.S. Attorney went to court and said, “We cannot keep up. We are every day responding not just to Habeas lawsuits but to orders from the judge saying, show cause why you haven’t released this person yet.” The chief judge in Minneapolis has faulted the government there for not complying with dozens and dozens of orders that people be freed.

AMY GOODMAN: Brad Heath, we want to thank you for being with us. We’re going to link to your article for Reuters, Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped..