Speed, substituted for process

Immigration policy changed faster over the past year and a quarter than litigation could track. The simplest way describe it 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 moved people from regular proceedings into expedited removal. The birthright citizenship order would have created a class of people born already deportable. The pattern was the substitution of speed for process.

The June 2026 rulings did not reverse that pattern; they cut back two of its worst instruments. Some of what the executive orders set in motion is now unwound. Much of it is not.

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, later 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 DHS also rescinded the long-standing policy that had kept immigration enforcement out of sensitive locations such as schools, hospitals, and courthouses.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 — and what the courts eventually undid, in different ways, one year later.

Deportation to a foreign prison

This was the starkest due-process fight of 2025. 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 route, even as all nine justices agreed that some notice 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 the invocation itself unlawful, on the ground that there is no actual invasion.

Trump v. Barbara: the order struck down

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. Every lower court to consider it ruled it illegal. It never took effect.

On 30 June 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court affirmed those rulings and struck the order down. The vote was 6 to 3 on the order’s illegality overall, and 5 to 4 on the constitutional question. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson, holding that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Justice Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment on statutory grounds only, refusing to sign the constitutional reasoning. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented.

The split matters. The constitutional holding, the piece that would keep a future administration from trying the same thing, commanded only five votes. Change one and the meaning of the Citizenship Clause could shift.

A separate, earlier ruling from the birthright fight continues to reshape everything else. In June 2025, in Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court barred nationwide injunctions. A single court could no longer block a federal policy nationwide, so challengers had to proceed through class actions instead. Every other challenge in this artifact has been slower, narrower, and harder because of that ruling.

From Los Angeles to Washington and back

What began as a single deployment in Los Angeles in June 2025 became a pattern. Over the next six months the administration federalized or moved National Guard troops into Washington, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, and New Orleans, generally framed as protecting federal personnel and property tied to immigration enforcement. Courts blocked most of them. One remained.

Los Angeles

After the June 2025 raids, the president federalized the California National Guard — eventually about 4,000 troops — along with 700 Marines. Governor Newsom sued on 9 June 2025 in the Northern District of California. On 2 September 2025, a federal judge ruled the deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act. In December the judge ordered it to end, and it concluded on 31 December 2025. California won on Posse Comitatus and the troops left, but the Ninth Circuit allowed the underlying federalization to stand.

Racial profiling — Vasquez Perdomo

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. But in September 2025, 6–3, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, letting the patrols resume. On 26 February 2026 the plaintiffs amended their complaint to allege the raids are deliberately designed to target Latino communities, and on 26 July 2026 they moved again for a preliminary injunction, arguing DHS has abandoned any “totality of circumstances” analysis and is relying on racial shortcuts. The case is live.

Washington, Chicago, Portland

In August 2025 Trump federalized the D.C. National Guard as part of a “Make DC Safe and Beautiful” mission; the force reached about 2,400 to 2,500 troops, drawn largely from Republican-led states. On 20 November 2025 a federal judge ruled the deployment “for the deterrence of crime” was illegal; appeals are pending; the troops remain on the ground and the administration has said the deployment will continue through the end of 2026.

In October 2025 the administration sent Texas National Guard troops to the Chicago area to support ICE (“Operation Midway Blitz”), and 300 Illinois Guard troops shortly after; on 9 October a federal judge blocked the deployment, extended it indefinitely on 22 October, and on 24 December 2025 the Supreme Court refused to allow the Chicago deployment to proceed. In Portland, Judge Karin Immergut issued a permanent injunction on 7 November 2025 blocking Guard deployments there. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the 2025 deployments cost roughly $496 million through year-end.

Sequen v. Albarran: from Northern California to the whole country

On 24 December 2025, in Sequen v. Albarran, a federal court in the Northern District of California ordered ICE to stop arresting people at immigration courthouses across the San Francisco area of responsibility, covering Northern California, Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan. The court found the plaintiffs likely to succeed on their claim that the ICE and EOIR policy change was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Six months later, on 23 June 2026, Judge P. Casey Pitts granted partial summary judgment and expanded that ruling to the whole country. He vacated three courthouse-arrest policies and the 12-hour-hold-waiver policy, finding again that the agencies had acted arbitrarily and capriciously and had disregarded the constitutional consequences of the change. The order also restored the pre-existing prohibition on holding people in short-term detention rooms for more than 12 hours.

The Schwartz Federal Building, and everything around it

San Diego is one of the busiest fronts in the country, and not always the loudest one. According to a Department of Homeland Security letter to Representative Mike Levin, ICE removed roughly 16,368 people from the San Diego area between 20 January 2025 and 1 April 2026. Reporting by CalMatters found arrests rose almost 1,500% in the May-through-October window of 2025 compared with the same months a year earlier.

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 the practice unlawful. The June 2026 ruling in Sequen v. Albarran (§ 06) now vacates those policies nationwide, subject to appeal. Also distinctive is the habeas wave: before this administration, habeas corpus petitions were rarely used in immigration cases, and in 2025 hundreds were filed in the Southern District of California alone. Federal judges there have systematically rejected the July 2025 mandatory-detention directive.

Enforcement showed up in the neighborhoods too. ICE agents raided Buona Forchetta, a small restaurant in South Park, in May 2025; the raid became a local flashpoint. Mutual-aid formations like Unión del Barrio now run pre-dawn patrols in Linda Vista and other neighborhoods, using WhatsApp groups with 700+ members to alert residents when agents are spotted. The weekly ICE Out of San Diego protest at the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building continues, organized by SEIU Local 221, Alliance San Diego, and others; observer coalitions including FAITH and Detention Resistance have been in the courthouse hallways throughout.

That presence has drawn its own escalation. In January 2026 an organizer was briefly detained at a Schwartz protest; in February, federal agents began issuing $280 “no loitering” citations to community observers in the courthouse hallways under new federal-building rules first published in summer 2025, restricting the observer coalitions’ access to the building. In August 2026 DHS unveiled the CTG-5 “G.L.O.V.E.”, an electric-shock glove to be issued to HSI and ERO agents at an estimated cost of $10–20 million; San Diego County supervisors Paloma Aguirre and Terra Lawson-Remer introduced legislation to rescind ICE access to county firing-range facilities.

A related Central California case with 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, August 2026

The record over the year and a quarter is genuinely mixed — more so now than in May, with two significant wins added and the National Guard picture clarified. A high-level reading:

The throughline: 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 (the Alien Enemies Act notice rulings, Trump v. Barbara, the refusal to green-light Chicago) and sometimes clearing obstacles for enforcement (Vasquez Perdomo, CASA).

The pattern that comes into focus in August 2026 is a two-track system: legal victories that peel back the most extreme instruments (the birthright order, the courthouse tactic), sitting alongside an ordinary-enforcement machine that has expanded enormously (16,368 removals from one region alone, hardware upgrades like the G.L.O.V.E., a persistent Guard presence in the capital). The wins are real. The scale of what continues is also real.