US Federal Judge Blocks Trump Policy To Fine Migrants Up To $1.8 Million

A federal judge on Monday blocked efforts by the Trump administration to impose fines of up to $1.8 million on migrants who fail to leave the US after receiving final deportation orders.

 

US District Judge George O’Toole in Boston issued the ruling in a class-action lawsuit filed last year by two of the thousands of migrants who have been assessed civil penalties by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

 

O’Toole said the administration had imposed the fines unlawfully. Halting the policies related to the penalties was necessary, he said, because collecting the fines would likely drive the plaintiffs into insolvency.

 

“The plaintiffs live in an economically precarious position even without the imposition of the government’s exorbitant fines,” he wrote.

 

As recently as July, the department said it had issued more than 103,000 fines to migrants, amounting to about $84 billion in total, since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.

 

While Congress authorised civil penalties under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, no administration sought to impose them until Trump’s first term.

 

Starting last year, Trump’s second administration began levying fines of $998 a day on migrants who failed to leave the US after receiving a deportation order. The fines have been imposed retroactively for up to five years, resulting in a maximum penalty of $1.8 million.

 

In July 2025, DHS and the US Department of Justice introduced a new process that they said would streamline the assessment of fines by eliminating a 30-day notice period and shortening the process for challenging penalties.

 

The plaintiffs, who also included the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, challenged that policy, as well as what they described as a practice by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS agency, of issuing fines using boilerplate forms without independently determining whether an individual’s failure to depart was “willful” or “voluntary”.

 

O’Toole, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, sided with the plaintiffs, ruling that the fines were unlawful and violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the forms lacked specific allegations explaining why an individual’s conduct warranted a penalty.

 

He also found that the administration had failed to comply with rulemaking procedures when adopting its streamlined fine-imposition process because it had not given the public an opportunity to comment on the policy change beforehand.