Last Updated on April 23, 2026 by Chicago Policy Review Staff
A routine visit to the immigration field office in Dallas, Texas, upended life for Mahir Tarabishi (62), who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in October 2025. Mahir’s detention proved fatal for his disabled son, Wael Taraishi, who died on January 23, 2026, in the absence of Mahir, his primary caretaker. ICE agents denied repeated pleas from Mahir to attend his son’s funeral, robbing him of a last opportunity to bid his son goodbye.
This heartbreaking story is not a one-off incident. Since the Trump administration began conducting immigration raids, communities across the United States have endured similar fates.
The targets of these raids have ranged from street vendors, students, healthcare workers, and many others, causing devastating social, cultural, and economic impacts to communities across the country.
While media outlets captured stories of immigration officials teargassing community members, arresting immigrants outside of courtrooms after hearings, and detaining the sole and primary caretakers of children, there came another blow. The Trump administration quietly limited the ability for detained immigrants to be released from detention on bond.
What is the new policy?
On July 8, 2025, Toddy M. Lyons, acting director of ICE, issued an internal policy memorandum ordering the prolonged detention of immigrants who crossed the U.S. border “for the duration of their removal proceedings,” a process that often takes years to complete.
This policy deprives immigrants of their right to be released on bond while waiting for their cases to be decided. This especially affects those who entered the U.S. without proper visa documentation, also called ‘without inspection.’ According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the policy is seen as a means to pressure immigrants into giving up on their cases by forcing them to stay detained.
An individual’s release from immigration detention on bond does not guarantee them permanent residence or protection from deportation. It simply allows the person to return home to continue their immigration proceedings without being confined to jail. After all, undocumented immigration was historically a civil infraction, which has become increasingly criminalized over the years, at the same time that European immigration to the U.S. has steadily declined.
Millions of undocumented people in the U.S. are being forced to cross the U.S./Mexico border in search of economic and physical safety from the everlasting violent impacts of U.S. imperialism, interventionism, and European colonialism. An academic law paper from Loyola University of Chicago Law School found that U.S. intervention in Central America led to increased violence, displacement, and political instability in the region. Another academic paper from the National Autonomous University of Mexico concluded that European colonialism led to the exploitation, dispossession, and cultural subjugation of indigenous communities across Latin America, which has led to massive generational structural inequities across the continent.
These structural inequities create barriers for individuals who do not have the means nor the financial capacity to undergo the complex process of applying for a U.S. visa. These are the same people who were forced to cross borders as an act of resistance against a carceral system that has criminalized the natural mobility and migration of racialized people.
Implications for U.S. taxpayers
Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003, the federal government has spent an estimated $409 billion dollars on the agencies that carry out immigration enforcement, and tens of billions more on border barriers and other immigration enforcement-related infrastructure projects.
Operating under the guise of “strengthening national security”, the U.S. government has ironically spent taxpayer dollars on violent and failed tactics to try to keep immigrants out, instead of pushing federal spending towards advancing social policy to improve the quality of life and safety of its own citizens.
“Trump’s cruel mass detention and deportation agenda is being executed at the expense of Americans receiving lifesaving healthcare and millions of kids having school lunches,” remarked advocates and members of the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Some U.S. citizens, such as Rachel Cohen, a Chicago-based lawyer, publicly declared to withhold her federal taxes as a way to protest this administration’s misuse and mishandling of taxpayer dollars on wars abroad and immigration enforcement.
United We Dream, the largest youth led community network in the United States, along with six other organisations released a statement, highlighting how instead of identifying policy solutions by addressing the root causes of migration such as, climate change, extractive economies, unregulated development, structural inequity, amongst many others – U.S. government officials have developed ways to profit off of the detention of immigrants.
In order to maximize profits, not only do more people need to be detained, but those people need to be detained longer, so much longer that they are denied their right to a bond hearing and to being released on bond entirely. By targeting immigrants who “entered without inspection” under this policy, the administration is creating the perfect conditions to exponentially double the number of people in detention centers in the months to come.
The complicated fight against the new bond policy
Civil rights advocates and immigration lawyers have named the illegality of this detention policy and filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for its blatant disregard of immigration law and denial of people’s fundamental rights to due process.
Detained immigrants who have access to legal counsel have spent thousands of dollars seeking attorneys who are willing to file a writ of habeas corpus, which challenges the legality of their detention in federal court, rather than through slower processes in immigration courts. What was once a rarely used, last resort tactic in immigration law has now become a strategy to try to prevent the prolonged detention of immigrants who can afford it.
Local immigration bond funds across the country are continuing to support the release of as many bond-eligible immigrants, despite bond amounts nearly tripling in cost since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
What was once a $2,500 immigration bond has jumped to $20,000 – an amount that, unlike in criminal court, must be paid in full before the person can be released from detention. Organizations like the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, among many others across the U.S., have played active roles in helping release bond-eligible individuals from immigration detention centers across the Midwest.
On February 18, 2026, District Court Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes of the Central District of California granted Plaintiffs’ motion to enforce and issued an order vacating the Board’s decision in Matter of Yajure Hurtado.
This meant that immigration judges could no longer deny immigration bond hearings outside of the 5th Circuit Court. Although this ruling is a major victory for immigrant rights advocates who argued that the Yajure Hurtado decision violated due process and led to indefinite detention, this court order did not guarantee the release of immigrants from detention, nor does it reverse the detrimental emotional and physical effects of being detained.
The court order also brings into question whether or not immigration judges will use their authority to conduct bond hearings and actually grant bonds.
Unfortunately, a stay was issued by a judge in Maldonado Bautista v. DHS on March 6, 2026. This means that while the appeal proceeds, the government can pause the requirement to provide bond hearings, effective nationwide except in the Central District of California. As the legal proceedings unfold, an immigrant’s ability to seek freedom from detention will remain challenging, sounding the alarm for many immigrant families and advocates across the country.
The need for bold, human-centered immigration policy
In a society that benefits from the exploitative labor of immigrants and profits off their detention, relying solely on discretionary policies and practices from judges is insufficient. Policy solutions must be bold, human-centered, and multifaceted, especially in a country where many people do not view immigration detention and enforcement as a priority. Advocates have expressed the need to overhaul the federal immigration budget by moving funds away from detention and enforcement and toward asylum processing and humanitarian needs.
As per a poll conducted by Marist Institute for Public Opinion, 65% of U.S. citizens disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws, and 62% of U.S. citizens believe ICE is reducing Americans’ safety.
According to Setareh Ghandehari, Advocacy Director at Detention Watch Network, “The American public is intensifying their demand to abolish ICE…We must demand [that] members of Congress act now to cut ICE funding, get ICE out of communities nationwide, and shut down ICE detention centers for good. No more abuse and death at the hands of ICE and no more ICE funding while people lose health care, struggle to pay rent, and kids go hungry.”
The impacts of the Trump administration’s immigration raids will be felt for months, if not years to come. Communities across the U.S. are hurting – families are still being torn apart, protestors continue being criminalized, and businesses are still seeing economic losses. Painful stories like Mahir’s serve as a reminder that there are names, faces, and lived experiences attached to every person in immigration detention. They should serve as reminders that any system that profits from human suffering is one that needs to be ended.