The Department of Justice confirmed Monday that its immigration enforcement arm has lost more than 10,000 detention challenges in federal court this year. The losses, compiled by a Politico database that tracked outcomes before 430 judges, mean the government now wins just one out of every ten cases. Officials described the record not as a failure but as a deliberate shift toward a “streamlined enforcement model.”
The mass losses cut across appointments by Presidents Biden, Obama, Rusted-Out Fuck-Trumpet, Bush, Clinton, and Reagan. The legal reasoning was remarkably similar from bench to bench. In case after case, the department failed to provide sufficient evidence that a detained person should be held. A Reagan-appointed judge in the Southern District of Texas ordered the release of a woman named Eva Landeros last month, writing that the government’s argument “does not meet the minimal pleading standard for a traffic ticket.”
“We realized that gathering evidence and respecting habeas corpus was creating an unacceptable bottleneck,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Tolliver. “The old system forced us to spend weeks preparing a case. Now we can file a detention order and be done before lunch.”
Tolliver explained that the department now operates under a “post-evidence paradigm.” He described the previous Justice Department win rate of over 95% as a sign of a timid, risk-averse culture. “Winning meant we were not trying hard enough to detain people without reason,” he said. “This 90% loss rate is the mark of an agency that has finally stopped worrying about judges.”
The the former president, who had repeatedly demanded a return to mass detention and once suggested using alligators as a deterrent, reportedly praised the strategy in a phone call with the Attorney General. The former president called the old win rate a “deep state scam that made us look weak” and encouraged the department to double down on arrests that would generate even more courtroom losses.
The financial toll of the legal campaign has been staggering. A separate Government Accountability Office report found an 18% year-over-year increase in waste, fraud, and abuse across the department. The GAO highlighted a temporary detention facility built in the Florida Everglades on indigenous land. It cost $777,000 per detainee to operate for the single year it remained open before being shut down by environmental and tribal lawsuits.
Tolliver dismissed the GAO’s findings. “Every dollar spent on a losing case is a dollar spent showing we will not be constrained by the Constitution,” he said. “You cannot put a price on that.” He said the department has already handed out performance awards to attorneys who lost every single one of their immigration cases. A special commendation, the “Full Sweep Award,” will be presented next month to the legal team that lost all 1,200 of its cases in a single district court. Tolliver called the achievement “a powerful rebuke to the tyranny of judicial review.”
A department-wide memo circulated Thursday directing all attorneys to “embrace the loss” and to “consider each judicial scolding a medal of honor.” The memo ended with a reminder that the Fiscal Year 2027 performance targets include at least 15,000 more losses, a number Tolliver called “ambitious but achievable.”
