US judge blocks Trump policy of fining 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. He said the administration imposed the fines unlawfully. Halting the penalty-related policies was necessary, O'Toole 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. DHS had no immediate ‌comment.

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 authorized 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 per day for migrants who failed to leave the US after a ⁠deportation order. Those fines have been imposed retroactively for up to five years, for a maximum penalty of $1.8 million. In July 2025, ​DHS and the US Department of Justice implemented a new process 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 assessing whether someone's failure to depart was "willful" or "voluntary." O'Toole, an appointee of Democratic President ⁠Bill Clinton, sided with the plaintiffs, holding 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 the administration had failed to comply with rulemaking processes in adopting its streamlined fine-imposition process because it did not provide the ‌public a chance ‌to comment on the policy change first.