Attorney’s fees — a hidden cost of Trump’s mass immigrant detention agenda

Courthouse News has identified nearly 100 cases this year in which the government was ordered to pay attorney’s fees to an immigrant it unlawfully detained, totaling more than $1.1 million. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement enforcement and removal operations in Los Angeles on June 12, 2025. (DHS photo by Tia Dufour) MANHATTAN (CN) — On Jan. 15, at the height of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, a Venezuelan family of six was detained by federal immigration authorities who raided their St. Paul home at gunpoint on unfounded claims the family was undocumented and its patriarch, Joel Campos, was a narcotics trafficker. All six, including Campos’ 12-year-old son Santiago, were flown to Texas the next day and split between two detention centers. Santiago, who has asthma, said he was denied access to his inhaler. The family told local news stations they slept on the floor without access to food or a shower. Immigration and Customs Enforcement claimed it had a warrant to storm the Campos residence. But it never produced one, even when pressed by a federal judge, who wound up releasing the family weeks later as a result. In court filings, a government attorney reportedly apologized to the family, who said they were in the country legally and had state-issued IDs to prove it. The judge ordered the government to pay $17,505 in attorney’s fees — restitution for the family needing to defend themselves in court against the unlawful arrests. It’s part of an emerging trend amid the Trump administration’s unprecedented immigrant detention campaign. Courthouse News has identified 97 habeas corpus cases throughout 2026 in which the government has been ordered to pay the legal fees of immigrants it illegally detained, adding up to more than $1.1 million in total. The legal concept is a novel one. The payments are being granted pursuant to the Equal Access to Justice Act, a 1980 law that allows parties to collect attorney’s fees when they win a civil case against the government. But it wasn’t until the second Trump administration — during the ongoing explosion of immigration arrests, and subsequent habeas corpus petitions arguing the detentions are illegal — that the EAJA has been applied to immigration cases. In May, a federal judge awarded more than $39,600 in EAJA attorney’s fees to Valentina De Los Angeles Tiapa Moreno, a Venezuelan woman whom the government tried to deport after she witnessed ICE shoot her cousin through a closed door in Minnesota. As it turned out, the agency was after someone else entirely, but agents nonetheless stormed their home with tear gas, arrested Moreno and shipped her to a detention facility in New Mexico. “If a reasonable basis for any of the actions described above exists — and the court is doubtful — respondents have failed to articulate it,” wrote U.S. District Judge Margaret Strickland, a Joe Biden appointee in New Mexico, in granting the EAJA motion, which was among the largest of 2026. Another sizable sum came out of the Western District of Washington, where a judge granted more than $41,800 to Daixon Jose Ramirez Tesara, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who was unlawfully detained at an immigration check-in. That district, home to Seattle’s federal courthouse, has accounted for the most attorney’s fees awarded to immigrant habeas petitioners this year. It’s not close — of the at least $1.13 million awarded nationwide this year, judges in the Western District of Washington have granted more than $441,000 of that through 35 different cases. The next highest district is New Mexico, which granted about $95,000, followed by the Central District of California with nearly $86,000. Seattle-based immigration attorney Matt Adams, who was on Tesara’s legal team, said his district got a head start on the others around the country. His firm, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, filed a class action against the government last March, challenging its mandatory detention policy for noncitizens just months into Pres