Immigration lawsuits are dominating Philly’s federal courthouse as ICE push continues
By Abraham Gutman and Chris Palmer
Published February 23, 2026
Before this summer, detained immigrants filed release petitions with Philadelphia’s federal court a handful of times a year. A new ICE detention policy led to hundreds of filings in recent months.
Philadelphia’s federal courthouse has become awash in lawsuits filed by undocumented immigrants challenging the government’s attempts to detain them, an Inquirer review has found, the latest example of how the mass deportation push by President Donald Trump’s administration has been affecting the nation’s legal landscape.
Through six weeks this year, court figures show, 168 such lawsuits have been filed in Pennsylvania’s Eastern District Court, up from 115 in all of 2025.
By contrast, only 11 such suits were filed between 2020 and 2024, meaning a new practice of litigation dominating the region’s federal court practically sprung up overnight.
U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond wrote in a recent court filing that these lawsuits, known as habeas petitions, now represent more than one in six civil suits filed in the district.
In other jurisdictions, the surge has become so pronounced that judges and attorneys say they’re struggling to keep up. In New Jersey, the region’s chief judge last week issued new procedures for filing and litigating the petitions, writing: “The volume and timing of these filings is creating a substantial burden on the Court’s ability to expeditiously docket, assign, and address” them.
And in Minnesota, a federal judge took the highly unusual step of holding a Justice Department attorney in contempt for failing to follow orders about the terms of an immigrant’s release.
In Philadelphia, nearly all of the increase in habeas petitions appears tied to the Trump administration’s decision last summer to mandate detention for virtually every undocumented immigrant encountered by authorities. ICE and other agencies are now confining people who would have previously been eligible to remain in the community while their cases wound through the immigration system, such as people who have been in the country for years, or those who have not complied with ICE’s instructions while living here.
“It was not a big part of our work up until about six months ago,” said Chris Setz-Kelly, a managing attorney with HIAS Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that provides legal assistance to immigrants.
