Week of June 17–23, 2026

Internal government documents filed in the Supreme Court case over Temporary Protected Status suggest the Department of Homeland Security did not carry out the consultation the statute requires before terminating the designation for Haiti.

Federal law directs the department to consult appropriate agencies, traditionally the State Department, when assessing conditions in a country up for renewal. DHS said last summer that then-Secretary Kristi Noem acted on a USCIS review of conditions in Haiti and in consultation with the State Department, and the Federal Register notice said the same.

An email exchange between USCIS officials working on a separate Venezuela termination indicates the State Department recommendation never arrived. “We have not received a recommendation from them,” one official wrote in June 2025. About 350,000 Haitians are affected.

Source: Miami Herald

Revised detention standards let contractors running Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities rely more heavily on artificial intelligence to communicate with detainees, while continuing to pay $1 a day for what the agency calls voluntary work.

ICE said the standards, which apply to for-profit operators and jails holding detainees, were revised with input from partners to “reduce the burden on our detention operators” and move toward the looser rules the U.S. Marshals Service uses for pretrial detainees.

Michelle Brane, a former Department of Homeland Security ombudsman, said the changes will worsen conditions for the roughly 60,000 people in custody. The revisions come as facilities report record deaths and face allegations of medical neglect and inadequate food.

Source: NBC News

Federal judges have found more than 13,000 times in recent months that ICE detained people unlawfully without a chance for release. But the bond hearings that follow are run by immigration judges within the Justice Department, who are under pressure to deny bond in nearly all cases.

That has produced a wave of new litigation from detainees arguing their bond hearings were themselves a denial of due process. District judges, who cannot review an immigration judge's discretionary findings, are increasingly ordering immediate release instead of sending people to hearings they consider foreordained.

Judges are also examining the hearings for constitutional defects, such as applying the wrong standard, ignoring contrary evidence or failing to consider alternatives to detention.

Source: Politico

U.S. District Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered immigration officials to release Salah Sarsour, the Palestinian-born president of Wisconsin's largest mosque, finding he had raised a substantial claim that he was targeted for speaking in support of Palestinian rights.

Sarsour, a lawful permanent resident, was detained on March 30. The government said he posed a foreign policy threat. Hanlon, appointed by President Trump in 2018, wrote that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security offered insufficient evidence to rebut the retaliation claim and did not explain why he became a threat after more than three decades of lawful residence. “The mere invocation of foreign relations concerns does not automatically trump First Amendment rights,” he wrote.

Sarsour, who has diabetes, lost more than 30 pounds in 80 days of detention.

Source: CNN

Asylum seekers deported by the United States to Sierra Leone are being told they will be sent on to their home countries, despite U.S. court orders barring their removal to those countries, according to a lawyer for one of the migrants and documents seen by the Associated Press.

About a dozen people arrived on Thursday, the second such flight after nine West African migrants landed last month. A pamphlet handed to them in Freetown by Kenvah Solutions, a contractor hired by the Sierra Leonean government, says officials are working to “return you home as quickly and safely as possible.”

Sierra Leone is one of at least ten African countries with third-country deportation agreements with the United States.

Source: AP News

A federal judge in Texas blocked a 2024 rule that allowed immigration judges to indefinitely close a deportation case, hours after the state sued to stop it.

The rule permitted an immigration judge to close a case after hearing from the government and the immigrant, particularly where the person might qualify for a benefit allowing them to remain lawfully. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the 43-page complaint in the Northern District of Texas before Judge Reed O'Connor, arguing the rule “effectively grant(s) indefinite amnesty to aliens illegally present in this country.”

The suit was co-filed by America First Legal Foundation, founded by White House adviser Stephen Miller, which has previously represented Paxton in challenges to federal immigration policy.

Source: The Texas Tribune

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the Department of Homeland Security from using its revamped SAVE system to verify the citizenship of registered voters, in a 75-page decision in Washington, D.C.

The department rebuilt the immigration status database last year to make it easier for state and local election officials to check voter rolls. Voting rights and privacy groups argued the overhaul made the system less accurate and risked disenfranchising eligible voters.

“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. DHS General Counsel James Percival criticized the ruling. States administer federal elections, and audits have consistently found noncitizen voting to be rare.

Source: NBC News

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Blanche v. Lau that immigration officers do not need clear and convincing evidence that a lawful permanent resident committed a disqualifying crime before refusing to admit them on return from a trip abroad.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, writing that the decision undermines the security a green card confers and hands the government “a massive blank check” to place permanent residents in immigration limbo.

The case arose from a 2012 encounter with Muk Choi Lau, a Chinese citizen and permanent resident who had been charged under New Jersey law with selling counterfeit clothing. Officers paroled rather than admitted him.

Source: SCOTUSblog

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts vacated the policies that allowed immigration agents to arrest noncitizens at immigration courthouses nationwide, finding the Justice Department gave no reasoned explanation for them.

The 2025 guidance removed prior limits and produced a sharp rise in arrests of people attending removal proceedings, many of them pursuing lawful status. Pitts called the policies arbitrary and capricious and wrote that the gap between ICE's stated rationales and the expansion of courthouse arrests reflects “not merely unreasoned decisionmaking but a complete lack of decisionmaking.”

Pitts had earlier halted the practice in the Northern District of California. The Justice Department had asked him to confine any ruling to the San Francisco area.

Source: Politico

The Department of Homeland Security proposed adjusting the fees U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services charges for Form N-400, the naturalization application, and Form N-336, the request for a hearing on a denial.

The proposal would end the reduced fee option for the N-400 and eliminate fee waivers for both forms. Current and former members of the armed forces would remain exempt when naturalizing under the military provisions. The department says the change aligns the charges with the cost of adjudicating the forms.

Comments are due by August 24, 2026, under docket number USCIS-2026-0265. Fee waivers have long allowed low-income lawful permanent residents to apply for citizenship without paying the full filing fee.

Source: Federal Register