Internal DOJ documents tell story on caseload surge amid Trump immigration moves

A push to force all migrants to await deportation from detention and other Trump administration immigration policies have pushed the number of cases to record highs for the Department of Justice (DOJ) branch that handles such litigation.

The Hill recently obtained internal DOJ metrics showing staff levels have plummeted while the department is also handling unprecedented caseloads.

But that dynamic was particularly pronounced in the civil division’s Office of Immigration Litigation (OIL), which has lost nearly 80 attorneys as workload has jumped 63 percent.

There are multiple factors at play behind the surge.

“I think there are two big drivers,” said Margy O’Herron, a former official in the deputy attorney general’s office during the Biden administration who oversaw immigration work.

“OIL represents the government in cases where the Board [of Immigration Appeals] denies asylum,” she said, noting that grants of the protection are at a “historic low.”

The other is the Trump administration’s decision to cut off bond hearings for migrants, prompting a wave of habeas petitions from migrants demanding the government justify why they are being held.

“The habeas cases have grown significantly, because the administration has begun detaining people who have no criminal history, have been in the country for a long time, and would not have been detained under prior administrations. Now they’re holding them in immigration jails,” said O’Herron, now a senior fellow at the Brennan Center.

There may also be another wave of new cases coming that would not be reflected in the data obtained by The Hill: the Trump administration’s effort to boost denaturalizations.

The DOJ boasted Monday that it had filed 40 denaturalization cases, calling it “the largest volume of complaints submitted in a single period under the Trump administration,” from late August to early October.

One former OIL attorney said staffers there have been given a goal to file 300 such cases.

The DOJ did not respond to request for comment for this story.

OIL’s staff fell from 320 attorneys at the start of the Trump administration down to 243 in August. Meanwhile, cases handled by the branch have climbed from roughly 7,700 to nearly 9,500.

It’s not just OIL; the DOJ has been bleeding staff across its civil division as waves of attorneys have left the department.

But the Trump administration’s interest in immigration has piled on the workload for the diminished crop of attorneys in that branch.

The administration has also remade the immigration courts managed under the DOJ, including the Board of Immigration Appeals — firing and replacing many immigration judges in the system.

Asylum grants have been declining for years, but they’ve plunged to new lows under President Trump. While grant rates dropped from about 50 percent to the low 30s under the Biden administration, just 5.5 percent of asylum applicants as of June received grants, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

Those who appeal their denials have their cases heard in the federal appeals court system, which is handled by OIL.

“Because there’s so many denials, and there will be more, more cases are going to be appealed into federal court,” O’Herron said.

But perhaps the biggest shift in casework has been due to the overwhelming number of migrants filing habeas petitions in an effort to leave detention while they fight their removal case in immigration court.

Gregory Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the denial of bond hearings is “the most obvious reason for the surge.”

Immigration courts for years had released migrants on bond as their cases were pending, but the Trump administration brought an end to such hearings — a policy set to be reviewed by the Supreme Court later this term.

“Judges use a standard two-prong analysis, which is whether the person is a flight risk or poses a public safety threat,” Chen said, noting the costly alternative of detaining people, with nearly 70,000 migrants currently held in detention.

“It’s just not humane or fair to be forcing people to go through multiple layers of expensive, costly litigation to try to get the opportunity to come before a judge and tell the judge that they shouldn’t be denied their freedom,” he continued. “American taxpayers should really be angry that the Trump administration has created essentially a multiple-tiered structure, giving people the runaround if they want to ask a judge to consider where they need to be detained, and that’s a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars.”

In the early days of the Trump administration — March 2025 — just 105 people had filed habeas petitions to seek their release.

But such cases have soared this year. Data from TRAC shows that in February and March 2026, the most recent data, more than 8,000 and 9,000 habeas cases were filed monthly.

For the most part, migrants have been successful in court.

A June analysis from Politico found that judges had sided with migrants on habeas cases more than 15,000 times but sided with the administration in just 2,200 cases.

The same dynamic has played out as the policy has made its way through appeals courts.

“Nine of 11 circuits have also ruled against the government, so it’s not a strong case for the government to bring. But I think they’re going to take their chances with the Supreme Court and hope that their interpretation gets upheld. If it does, it would really remake the way that immigration detention works in this country,” O’Herron said.

“It would take huge numbers of people with no conviction, with strong ties to the United States, including citizen family members, citizen children, American employers, and put them in jail while they wait to challenge their cases.”

Chen noted detention has been a tool for the Trump administration to pressure migrants to give up their case and agree to be deported.

“This administration has effectively weaponized immigration detention as a way to intimidate and frighten people away from getting their fair day in court on their case,” he said.

“Detaining people while they’re waiting for the case to be decided is a horrendously frightening thing for anybody because the conditions are harsh and often inhumane, and people suffer poor conditions as well as abuses in detention, and many people simply give up, even if they have a strong case for their legal relief to be able to stay in the United States, just because they’re too afraid to stay another day, another night in a detention cell.”

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