The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan is suing President Donald Trump’s administration on behalf of eight detained “Michigan residents” in the country illegally.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on Sept. 29, challenges a directive from the Trump administration in July that the ACLU claims “reverses decades of government policy and practice and could result in millions of people being unlawfully detained despite immigration laws and constitutional due process protections that entitle them to a bond hearing.”
“On July 8th, in defiance of the Constitution, in defiance of immigration law, and in defiance of decades of agency practice, ICE adopted a new directive to categorically deny bond hearings to anyone who allegedly entered the country without documents,” ACLU MI senior staff attorney Miriam Ackerman said in a half-hour press conference Thursday.
ACLU-MI filed a federal lawsuit demanding that 8 people detained by ICE, including a father of three US citizen children who suffers from leukemia and has had his life-saving treatments disrupted while in custody, be immediately released or given bond hearings within seven days. pic.twitter.com/npoBgtgS1s
— ACLU of Michigan (@ACLUofMichigan) October 2, 2025
“We don’t just lock people up and throw away the key. Rather, judges decide who should be behind bars,” she said. “That is true for citizens and non-citizens for decades as required by both the Constitution and immigration law.”
All eight “Michigan residents” represented by the ACLU entered the U.S. without authorization or documentation, some as long as 25 years ago. They do not have criminal records beyond violating federal immigration laws and traffic offenses, and are being held in detention facilities in Michigan and Ohio.
“The lawsuit alleges that, under the U.S. Constitution and immigration law, the federal government must give them a hearing before an immigration judge who can decide whether they should be locked up or can return to and live with their families while their immigration cases proceed, a process that could take months or years,” according to the ACLU.
The lawsuit demands a judge immediately release all eight illegal immigrants or provide them with bond hearings within a week. It names Detroit’s ICE field office director, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the department itself, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
The case follows another similar ACLU lawsuit on behalf of Juan Manuel Lopez-Campos, who was detained at the Monroe County Jail without a bond hearing by ICE. That lawsuit, which made the same demands, resulted in ICE releasing Lopez-Campos from custody.
ICE acting director Todd Lyons issued a directive on July 8 requiring nearly all illegal immigrants to be detained for the duration of their removal proceedings, effectively eliminating the ability of immigration judges to grant bond for release.
The directive is based on an immigration law approved by Democratic President Bill Clinton that mandated detention for illegal immigrants, and it eliminated exceptions for when there is limited detention space.
The change followed just days after the 47th POTUS signed his One Big Beautiful Bill into law to provide $45 billion in new federal funding to boost ICE’s detention capacity, resources and manpower.
“We have now for the last several months had zero illegal people, and illegal aliens and criminals released into our country,” U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said at a conference on Mackinac Island last month, drawing a thunderous applause. “In fact, we’ve deported almost 400,000 people, but because of our messaging campaign in other countries and here in the United States, we’ve had 1.6 million people voluntarily say, ‘I’m going to go home.’”
Statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirm zero releases of illegal immigrants for May through August, as attempted border crossings continued to plunge.
For August, the 26,19 encounters nationwide represented a 93% decline from a monthly peak of 370,883 during President Joe Biden’s administration.
The 6,319 Border Patrol apprehensions on the southern border for August was a 96% decline from the monthly average under the Biden administration, while the 204 daily apprehensions for August were down by the same percentage.