A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration's policy of slapping migrants with fines of up to $1.8 million for failing to leave the United States after receiving final deportation orders — freezing a penalty program that has already produced more than 103,000 fines totaling about $84 billion, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Judge: the fines were imposed unlawfully
U.S. District Judge George O'Toole in Boston issued the ruling Monday in a class-action lawsuit filed last year by two migrants assessed civil penalties, joined by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. O'Toole ruled the administration imposed the fines unlawfully, writing that halting the policy was necessary because collecting them 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," O'Toole wrote, according to Reuters. The plaintiffs also challenged a practice by ICE of issuing the fines using boilerplate forms, without independently assessing whether a person's failure to depart was "willful" or "voluntary."
A dormant law, revived and supercharged
Congress authorized such civil penalties in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 — but no administration had sought to impose them until President Donald Trump's first term. Starting last year, his second administration began levying $998 per day for migrants who failed to leave after a deportation order, applied retroactively for up to five years — which is how individual penalties reached a maximum of $1.8 million.
In July 2025, DHS and the Justice Department streamlined the process further, eliminating the 30-day notice period and shortening the window for migrants to challenge the penalties. The administration has presented the fines as a tool for its sweeping mass-deportation agenda; DHS had no immediate comment on Monday's ruling.
One more front in the immigration court wars
The ruling is the latest collision between the administration's enforcement drive and the courts. The fines fight follows a string of setbacks and standoffs: federal judges have also blocked a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly weighed the administration's third-country deportation policy, which has already removed an estimated 25,000 migrants to countries not their own.
Supporters of the fines argue Congress explicitly authorized them and that strong penalties are needed to compel compliance with deportation orders. Immigrant-rights groups counter that penalties reaching seven figures — issued against people in poverty, sometimes by boilerplate — are punishment, not process.
The takeaway: with $84 billion in fines hanging over thousands of migrants, a single Boston judge has just pressed pause on one of the most aggressive — and least noticed — weapons in the administration's deportation arsenal. An appeal is all but certain, and the fight is far from over.
Watch: Search YouTube for coverage of the migrant fines ruling
Music in our reel: Kevin MacLeod - Hitman (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0