ICE removed an estimated 116 immigration detainees from South Florida in violation of federal habeas orders, judge found

On July 16, 2026, Department of Justice attorneys told U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore in Miami that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had removed an estimated 116 immigration detainees from the Southern District of Florida in direct violation of federal court orders. The orders were habeas corpus petitions instructing ICE not to transfer detainees out of the district while their bond hearings were pending. The count grew from an initial 47 violations discovered after ICE evacuated the Krome Detention Facility to other states during nearby brushfires; Moore ordered a broader review once alerted to those 47, and DOJ attorneys returned with the higher figure. Some violations were never reported to the court until Moore began asking, and one was disclosed only the day before the hearing.

Moore, visibly frustrated, told ICE and DOJ attorneys the violations "would not stand" and rejected the agencies' attempt to attribute the pattern solely to the brushfire evacuation, noting many transfers predated the fires and had nothing to do with them. An ICE attorney told the court the agency could "accept that there was incompetence" in the cases. DOJ attorney Matthew Feely attributed the underlying crisis in part to the Department of Homeland Security's position that it does not have to provide bond hearings to immigration detainees, a stance that produced roughly 1,800 habeas petitions in the district between June 2025 and July 2026, compared with 23 in all of 2022. Moore ordered nine cases before him to receive immediate bond hearings and invited transfer of related cases from other judges in the district so he could consider them together. DOJ said it needed two weeks to confirm the full 116 figure, with a follow-up hearing scheduled for August 6, 2026.

This entry is distinct from the archive's prior individual instances of ICE court-order defiance (including cases in Colorado, New York, and Iowa) — it records a judicially disclosed, systemic pattern spanning dozens of cases in a single federal district, first quantified at this hearing, rather than a single detainee's arrest or transfer.