President Donald Trump’s sweeping mass deportation scheme is completely crushing the U.S. court system—and that’s by design, Politico reported Sunday. On July 8, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement published a two-page memo expanding its policy on mandatory detention without bond to apply not only to immigrants who were caught illegally crossing the U.S. border, but to any undocumented immigrant. Under the new policy, every undocumented immigrant was treated as someone who was “seeking” to enter the U.S., even if they had lived here for years, had families, held jobs, and were in the process of seeking citizenship. Previous administrations had never applied this rule to immigrants already in the United States. The result was an unprecedented surge on the legal system, as judges scrambled to hear thousands of detainees’ cases before ICE could whisk them away to other states. Judge Fred Biery in the Western District of Texas told Politico his courthouse typically sees 1,500 lawsuits every year—but as of May, they’d already hit 4,000 cases. “We’ve never seen anything like this in my career,” he told Politico. Since ICE’s new policy on mandatory detention without bond was implemented, 469 judges have ruled that it is unlawful, while just 54 have sided with the Trump administration. Judges have ruled against detentions without bond more than 16,000 times in the last year. “The third branch of government is saying no. We’re not going to do it this way,” Biery said. Judge Troy Nunley, the chief judge in the Eastern District of California, told Politico the strain has been felt by judges and court staff alike. “All of our judges, we were up in the wee hours of the morning doing these cases because we had never seen these before. It was all hands on deck,” he said.In 2021, Nunley’s court saw just four immigration habeas cases. In May alone, his court saw 675. The judge has had to pull in other jurists from Hawaii and California to help shoulder the burden. All over the country, the courts are pushing back, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz told Politico. Until July 1, Schiltz was the chief of Minnesota’s federal district court. “The judiciary is the glue that’s holding the country together,” he said. “I do believe that’s true right now.”Meanwhile, the Trump administration has moved to fast-track hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants directly into deportation proceedings without interviewing them. The government has also rapidly expedited the removal of immigrant children.