ICE defied a New Jersey court's no-transfer order, moving detainee Jagpreet Singh to a Brooklyn facility

On February 18, 2026, at 12:30 p.m., ICE transferred detainee Jagpreet Singh from Delaney Hall in Newark to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York — roughly 22 hours after a no-transfer order had taken effect. U.S. District Judge Christine P. O'Hearn had issued the order the previous day, February 17, at 2:47 p.m., in Singh's habeas corpus case, prohibiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement from moving him outside New Jersey while his petition was pending; the order was emailed to the U.S. Attorney's Office within minutes.

In a February 19 order, O'Hearn characterized the transfer as "a blatant violation of a no removal order" and found Singh's detention "blatantly unlawful from the start," ordering his immediate release and a permanent injunction against his re-arrest under the statute ICE had invoked. She wrote that she was further alarmed because the U.S. Attorney's Office had admitted, the week before, that it was aware ICE had violated judicial orders more than 50 times in the preceding 60 days. When the government subsequently claimed in a related filing that the transfer had never occurred and that Singh remained at Delaney Hall the whole time, O'Hearn ordered sworn affidavits to resolve the discrepancy and wrote, on February 20, that "the presumption of regularity ... has been undeniably eroded" in her district and nationally.

The case became one of the examples cited five months later when ProPublica reviewed hundreds of federal cases from Trump's second term and found more than 40 in which judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, invoked the collapse of the presumption of regularity to rebuke Justice Department lawyers for misrepresenting facts to the court.

Updates

2026-07-28 — ProPublica cited the case in a nationwide review of DOJ court conduct [3]

ProPublica's investigation into more than 40 cases in which federal judges found Justice Department lawyers had misrepresented facts to courts described O'Hearn's rebuke of the Singh transfer as one instance of the broader pattern, noting that O'Hearn had written that the presumption of regularity "has been undeniably eroded" in her jurisdiction "and across the country." A DOJ spokesperson said the department's attorneys are "dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law."