“Untethered to the facts.” “Largely fictional.” “Outright lying.” That’s how judges have described many of the claims the Trump administration and immigration officials have advanced in lawsuits related to the ongoing deportation campaign.
The administration is fresh off a public pivot in its immigration enforcement operations, with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem now iced out and border czar Tom Homan taking the reins in the wake of the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Noem, along with deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and President Donald Trump amplified demonstrably false claims about Good and Pretti in the immediate aftermath of their fatal shootings last month, and DHS had already spent much of last year pursuing a PR campaign that substituted accurate messaging with inflammatory fodder for online MAGA amplifiers.
A parallel record of distortion has been playing out, not in press releases or social media but in courtrooms across the country. In the nearly half dozen large cities targeted by the Trump administration’s high-profile deportation operations, a growing body of judicial rulings and orders highlights a pattern in which immigration officers misrepresent or lie about enforcement operations in reports and evidence submitted in court. DHS has failed to comply with dozens of court orders.
Bystander videos of incidents in places like Los Angeles and Chicago have circulated online, showing aggressive tactics and seemingly excessive and illegal force employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection officers as they sweep people up and interact with protesters. But social media is often the worst place to sort fact from fiction about what happened on the ground.
That’s why the court challenges can offer an important window into how judges view the credibility of DHS and immigration officials and their justifications of the use of force and the detention of undocumented people.
Many of the hundreds of lawsuits related to immigration enforcement are still working their way through the legal system, but a number of judges have scrutinized DHS actions while evaluating whether to issue injunctions or temporary restraining orders brought by plaintiffs against the government. These are preliminary rulings, but they rely on evidence provided by both parties as well as sworn testimony and affidavits given under the penalty of perjury, and in some cases, the courts have held evidentiary hearings to further evaluate claims from plaintiffs and the federal government.
One of the most critical assessments of DHS conduct so far came in a class action lawsuit filed by protesters and journalists in Chicago alleging that immigration agents used unjustified and excessive force against peaceful observers, targeting them with pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tear gas. In a lengthy November order granting a preliminary injunction limiting enforcement agents’ broad use of crowd control tools, federal Judge Sara Ellis offered a searing indictment of ICE and Border Patrol justifications for their use of force. “After reviewing all the evidence submitted to the court and listening to the testimony elicited at the preliminary injunction hearing, during depositions, and in other court proceedings, the court finds Defendants’ evidence simply not credible,” Ellis wrote.
The judge detailed an array of claims and incident reports from immigration agents regarding the threats they purportedly faced during Chicago operations, including protests at an ICE processing facility in Broadview, a Chicago-area community. She noted that the government’s filings directed the court to specific timestamps in video evidence as part of its response to the lawsuit. But the footage, in fact, contradicted the government’s claims and showed that some agents lied on their use-of-force reports.
“ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
Judge Patrick Schiltz
The court determined that Gregory Bovino—the high-profile Border Patrol official who until last week had been leading operations in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis—was “not credible” and that in some instances, he was “outright lying” in his depositions for the case about his own use of force against protesters.
The court also found little evidence to support the government’s claims that protesters were ramming agents’ vehicles in Chicago on a daily basis, instead finding multiple inconsistencies in agents’ statements about vehicle encounters, often demonstrated by their own body camera footage. “At some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent,” Ellis wrote of the inconsistencies.
The judge concluded that the “widespread misrepresentations call into question everything that Defendants say they are doing in their characterization of what is happening at the Broadview facility or out in the streets of the Chicagoland area during law enforcement activities.”
An appeals court stayed the injunction, arguing it was overly broad and too prescriptive in its restrictions on DHS but still lauded the lower court’s fact-finding effort. The plaintiffs withdrew the lawsuit last month, citing the end of the aggressive enforcement operations in Chicago last fall.
Judges have also found a concerning pattern in the DHS responses to hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed on behalf of people detained by ICE. An analysis by Politico published late last month identified 2,400 cases in which judges have ruled ICE has illegally detained people without bond or due process. “Excepting changes to federal criminal sentencing laws, I can’t recall any other example of a federal policy that provoked quite so much litigation in such a short period of time—or litigation in which so many judges from across the geographical and ideological spectrum so overwhelmingly rejected the executive branch’s new interpretation of the relevant statutes,” Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor, wrote of the administration’s detention practices.
In one recent detention case, Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the federal district court in Minnesota, had to threaten acting ICE director Todd Lyons with a contempt hearing in order to get the agency to comply with an order to release Juan Tobay Robles, an Ecuadoran who had sought a writ of habeas corpus asking the government to justify his detention. The government did not respond to the petition, leading the court to order ICE to afford the detained man “a bond hearing within seven days or, failing that, to immediately release him from detention.” ICE did neither, and the judge then ordered Lyons to appear in court personally if Tobay Robles wasn’t released. Two days later, the man was released.
Schiltz emphasized the disturbing trend he and his colleagues have found in ICE’s lack of response to similar petitions. In a Wednesday order, Schiltz identified 96 court orders—just in January—that ICE had violated in other Minnesota cases. “This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law,” Schlitz wrote. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
“ICE is not a law unto itself,” he added. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin dismissed Schiltz’s order as a “diatribe from an activist judge.” But the judge has a notable conservative pedigree: He was appointed by President George W. Bush, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and mentored Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
In a separate detention case, one of Schiltz’s fellow Minnesota district court judges wrote in an order last week, “There has been an undeniable move by the government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights.”
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, published a recent analysis of the administration’s judicial proceedings, finding that officials misled courts more in matters dealing with immigration than anything else. Examples include cases like Oregon’s successful challenge to the administration’s attempt to deploy the National Guard in Portland to respond to protests and attacks at an ICE building. The district court judge in the case determined that the administration’s overall basis for the deployment “was simply untethered to the facts.” The court also assessed an ICE field office director’s testimony about the circumstances at the facility as “not reliable.”
Some of the starkest instances calling into question the reliability of enforcement agents’ claims can be found in cases the government has prosecuted but that have later been withdrawn or dismissed. Federal prosecutors dropped their own case against Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen who was following Border Patrol agents in her car in Chicago last year and was shot five times but survived. In many respects, Martinez’s case mirrored the administration’s later response to the Good and Pretti killings. DHS officials quickly labeled Martinez—along with a passenger in her car—an armed, domestic terrorist who rammed a Border Patrol vehicle and then stopped to box agents in, forcing agents to use “defensive fire.”
Martinez pleaded not guilty, and her lawyer argued in court that it was the Border Patrol agents who actually struck Martinez’s vehicle and fired on her as she was trying to drive away. The prosecution’s case quickly unraveled as inconsistencies emerged in the government’s statement of facts and body camera and nearby surveillance footage cast doubt on agents’ claims. Text messages also revealed that the agent who fired later bragged about it to friends. At prosecutors’ request, a judge dismissed the charges against Martinez, who is now trying to get the body camera footage released publicly, a move the government is attempting to block.
In a Texas case, a federal judge dismissed charges against Jaime Alberto Quintanilla-Chavez for allegedly assaulting a federal agent and resisting arrest after DHS agents stopped him and removed him from his vehicle. The court found a string of errors and inconsistencies in the agents’ claims about the incident and the legal justification for the initial stop—including the absence of a warrant—describing the account of the stop as “largely fictional.” The judge lambasted the prosecution for trying to charge Quintanilla-Chavez with forcibly resisting arrest and injuring an DHS agent when Quintanilla-Chavez was “at most, passively non-compliant;” an agent cut his own arm while breaking the window of Quintanilla-Chavez’s truck.
“The Defendant may very well be deportable; that is not for this court to decide,” Judge Xavier Rodriguez wrote. “But, on these facts, his indictment … represents the rare case in which the government’s conduct is so ‘shocking to the universal sense of justice’ that it should be deprived of the opportunity to prosecute the Defendant.”
Hundreds of individual challenges to the administration’s deportation campaign and enforcement actions are ongoing. Homan has pledged an enforcement pivot, but time will tell whether DHS changes course in its misrepresentations online and in court.
