Speed, substituted for process

Immigration policy changed faster over the past year than litigation could track. The simplest way to hold the year together is this: nearly every major change pushed people out of legal processes that include a hearing and into processes that do not.

Expedited removal skips the immigration judge. The Alien Enemies Act, as the administration used it, skipped almost everything. A July 2025 directive made detention mandatory for nearly everyone who entered without authorization, which removes bond hearings. Courthouse arrests move people from regular proceedings into expedited removal. The birthright citizenship order would have created a class of people born already deportable. The pattern, across all of it, was the substitution of speed for process.

The executive orders that set the terms

The year traces back to a stack of orders signed on the administration’s first day. On 20 January 2025, the president signed roughly ten immigration executive orders at once: declaring a national emergency at the border, blocking asylum seekers, expanding detention, moving to end birthright citizenship, suspending refugee admissions, and designating certain cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

The orders to know by name: EO 14159 (Protecting the American People Against Invasion, interior enforcement), EO 14160 (birthright citizenship), EO 14165 (Securing Our Borders, asylum), and EO 14157 (cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which later became the legal hook for the Alien Enemies Act). On 29 January 2025, the president signed the Laken Riley Act, which mandates detention of immigrants charged with or convicted of certain crimes.

The orders themselves were mostly directives. Their force came from what agencies did next. The day after EO 14159, DHS announced it would apply expedited removal to the fullest extent authorized by Congress, reviving the expansive interior policy from the first Trump term. DHS also rescinded the long-standing policy that had kept immigration enforcement out of sensitive locations such as schools, hospitals, and courthouses. That single rescission is what made the courthouse arrests of the following months possible.

Deportation to a foreign prison

This was the starkest due-process fight of the year. On 15 March 2025, the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime law — to deport Venezuelans accused of belonging to the gang Tren de Aragua. More than a hundred people were summarily deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

The courts pushed back, but unevenly. In April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that people challenging removal under the Act had to use habeas corpus in the district where they were held — a slower, harder route — even as all nine justices agreed that some notice and process was required. In May 2025, in a 7–2 decision, the Court held that giving detainees only about 24 hours of notice, with no information on how to contest removal, did not satisfy due process. Several lower courts went further and ruled that the invocation itself was unlawful, on the ground that there is no actual invasion.

The order, and the injunction ruling that reshaped everything

Executive Order 14160 ended automatic citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and of immigrants present legally but temporarily, such as those on student or work visas. The first judge to rule, a senior federal judge in Seattle, called it blatantly unconstitutional, and other judges followed in blocking it. The order has never taken effect.

The birthright fight also produced the year’s most consequential procedural ruling. In June 2025, in Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court barred nationwide injunctions. That forced the administration’s legal opponents to change tactics across many issues: a single court could no longer block a federal policy nationwide, so challengers had to proceed through class actions instead. The Supreme Court heard the merits of the birthright case, Trump v. Barbara, on 1 April 2026, with a decision expected by late June or early July. Every lower court to consider the order has found it illegal.

The raids, the troops, the profiling

In early June 2025, ICE ran workplace raids across Southern California. Two major cases grew directly out of the enforcement and the protests that followed.

The National Guard

After protests against the raids, the president federalized the California National Guard — eventually about 4,000 troops — along with 700 Marines, and Governor Newsom sued on 9 June 2025 in the Northern District of California. A federal judge ruled against the administration on 12 June; the Ninth Circuit stayed that; then, after a trial, the judge ruled on 2 September 2025 that the deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the 19th-century law barring the military from domestic law enforcement. In December the judge ordered the deployment to end, and it concluded on 31 December 2025. A mixed result: California won on Posse Comitatus and the troops left, but the Ninth Circuit allowed the underlying federalization to stand.

Racial profiling

The raids relied on roving patrols that stopped people based on appearance. In July 2025, a federal judge in the Central District of California barred stops based on race, ethnicity, language, occupation, or location, finding those practices likely violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, including by denying detainees access to counsel. The Ninth Circuit kept that order in place. But in September 2025, in a 6–3 order issued without full briefing, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, letting the roving patrols resume. A concurrence suggested that apparent ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, location, and type of work could be relevant factors for an immigration stop. The challengers won at the district court and the Ninth Circuit, and were reversed at the Supreme Court; the practice is currently allowed while litigation continues.

Courthouse arrests and the habeas wave

Two developments make San Diego distinct. First, ICE began arresting people at San Diego’s immigration court on 22 May 2025, and a San Diego law firm filed a class action asking a federal judge to declare those courthouse arrests unlawful, arguing they violate the constitutional rights of asylum seekers. That parallels the courthouse-arrest litigation elsewhere, but it is litigated in the Southern District of California on San Diego facts.

Second is the habeas wave. Before this administration, habeas corpus petitions were rarely used in immigration cases. In 2025, hundreds were filed in the Southern District of California alone, and federal judges there have been systematically rejecting the administration’s mandatory-detention policy. In one San Diego case, a detained man was released only after a federal judge granted a habeas petition finding his detention unjustified. Nationally, a federal judge noted that noncitizens had won their habeas petitions in 350 of 362 district-court cases. The habeas petitions are the main legal counter-pressure to the July 2025 mandatory-detention directive, and San Diego’s federal court is one of the busiest fronts for them.

A related Central California win involved San Diego counsel: in Kern County, the ACLU foundations of Northern California, Southern California, and San Diego & Imperial Counties secured a temporary injunction halting Border Patrol’s race-based sweeps of farmworker towns.

Where it stands, May 2026

The record over the year is genuinely mixed. A high-level reading of what the legal challenges did and did not achieve:

The throughline, for anyone catching up: the administration moved by executive action faster than litigation could keep pace; courts have repeatedly insisted that some process is constitutionally required; and the Supreme Court has been the swing point — sometimes enforcing process, as in the Alien Enemies Act notice rulings, and sometimes clearing obstacles for enforcement, as in Vasquez Perdomo and CASA.