Winning in court is no longer ending detention for a growing number of immigrants in the United States. An investigation published by The Guardian on Monday, November 2 found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is rapidly re-arresting people after federal judges order them released on habeas corpus petitions — in at least 20 cases across the country over the past year, identified from court records, attorneys and media reports. Some were taken back into custody within days of their release; in Minnesota, as Awaaz Punjab reported last week, seven were re-detained before they had even left the federal building where they were held.

Source: The Guardian, Nov 2, 2026

A habeas corpus petition — the Latin phrase means “you shall have a body” — asks a federal court to decide whether the government has the lawful right to keep a person locked up while their main immigration case proceeds. According to research by ProPublica cited in the report, immigrants have now filed more than 91,000 such petitions challenging detention, and more petitions have been filed since January 25 than during the past three presidential administrations, including President Donald Trump's first term, combined. The new pattern lawyers describe is what happens after a detainee wins: release on paper, followed quickly by a second arrest that attorneys say often violates the court's order.

A 77-year-old who won his release — and was arrested again within 10 days

Akram Mahmoud Omar, a 77-year-old Palestinian man, suffered a heart attack while he was detained at “Camp 57,” the ICE detention facility inside Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Louisiana. After he won release through a habeas petition, ICE arrested him again within 10 days, according to his attorney, Bridget Pranzatelli of the National Immigration Project, in a case first reported by The Intercept. Pranzatelli told The Guardian her organisation has seen a “very, very sharp increase” in people who are released on habeas petitions only to be very rapidly re-detained, often in violation of the federal court's order.

Another of Pranzatelli's clients, Ibrahim Mohammed, was re-arrested three times by ICE in Louisiana. In his case, a federal judge held a senior federal immigration official in contempt of court for violating release orders and demanded Mohammed's release, in a case first reported by the Banner. The Guardian's report carried no statement or comment from ICE or the Department of Homeland Security; the government's position is visible instead through its court filings and appeals, described below.

Minnesota: taken back before they reached the door

The Minnesota cases, first reported by MPR News and covered by Awaaz Punjab on October 28, remain the clearest picture of how fast a re-arrest can happen. Seven immigrants were re-detained before they even exited the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, the federal detention facility on the outskirts of Minneapolis in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Daniel Suitor, the attorney for two of those men, told The Guardian that being taken out of a building “directly into the arms of four or more officers” did not, in his view, comply with the court's release order. What is new in Monday's national investigation is the scale: the same pattern is now documented in at least 20 cases across multiple states, not only in Minnesota.

Judges are pushing back — including a contempt finding and an appeals-court rebuke

In an October ruling, the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Colorado rejected the government's attempt to dismiss a habeas petition on the ground that it had the power to re-detain the petitioner, and noted what it called the government's demonstrated pattern of re-detaining non-citizens who had been granted habeas relief. Federal judges in Pennsylvania and Minnesota have also held immigration authorities in contempt of court, or threatened to do so, over re-arrests that followed release orders. Lawyers say the legal fight turns on a basic question: how far a habeas judgment reaches — whether a ruling that one detention was unlawful also limits officers who make a new arrest, on a new basis, minutes or days later.

Why lawyers link the re-arrests to third-country deportations

Several attorneys told The Guardian they believe many re-detentions are connected to the administration's expanding programme of deporting people to third countries — nations where the person holds no citizenship and often has no ties — when their home country will not accept them or when they hold protection against removal there. Susanna Booth, a senior attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights in Washington, DC, attributed the pattern to an explosion of third-country agreements, primarily with African nations, over the past four months, and compared winning a petition only to face removal to a country such as Liberia to playing Whac-a-Mole with every country in the world. More than 25,000 non-citizens have been deported from the US to countries that are not their own; human rights experts cited in the report say people are often held in prisons or secured hotels abroad and pressured to return to their home countries, in what they say violates the Convention Against Torture.

In September, an appeals court ruled the administration had to give sufficient notice of third-country deportations and allow immigrants to contest them; shortly afterwards, the US Supreme Court's six-justice conservative majority granted an emergency stay, without issuing an explanation, allowing rapid third-country deportations to continue. Tess Hellgren, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, said lawyers now seek orders requiring at least three days' notice before the government tries to remove a person again — significant where officials may try to put someone on a flight out of the US immediately. Booth said her practice now prepares a second habeas petition in advance for clients at risk, ready to file immediately before a client is moved to another state and a less permissive court. Louisiana immigration attorney Joseph Giardina said two of his Egyptian clients, protected by withholding-of-removal orders, were re-detained weeks after winning habeas release and threatened with deportation before ultimately being granted asylum.

Many of the re-arrested, attorneys say, are picked up again with no apparent deportation plan in place, leaving them stranded in detention indefinitely while courts take months to work through the habeas backlog — particularly in Louisiana and Texas, where many detention centres are located, according to an analysis by Bolts, the New Orleans-based outlet The Lens and the Texas Tribune. Jonah Eaton, a litigation attorney with UnLocal who has filed habeas suits for detainees, summarised the fear among lawyers: they can win the battle in court and still lose the war, because authorities retain the ability to arrest people again and hold them for long periods.

What happens next: expect more contempt fights in district courts, further appeals-court rulings on whether a habeas release bars a rapid second arrest, and continued litigation over third-country removals. For now, the documented count stands at more than 20 re-arrest cases in a system handling more than 91,000 detention challenges — and, as the Minnesota cases showed last week, the outcome for each detainee can be decided in the minutes between a judge's signature and the facility door.