Maria L. v. Noem
On Day 1 of the current Trump Administration, the President signed an Executive Order that directed DHS to use immigration fines as a tool to pressure non-citizens to self-deport. The Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”) allows for the assessment of fines up to $998/day for any person with a final order of removal who “willfully fails or refuses” to depart the country, and a flat $3000 fine for any individual who fails to voluntarily depart the country during a specified period of time. Since the passage of these laws in 1996, these fines had never been imposed until the first Trump administration. Now, tens of thousands of people all over the country have received a fines under these laws, often exceeding $1.82 million dollars.
DHS has expressed its desire to scale its assessment of these penalties. In order to do this, it issued an Interim Final Rule (“IFR”) in late June 2025, which removed obstacles that could “hinder” its ability to assess as many of these fines, as fast as possible. Imposition and Collection of Civil Penalties for Certain Immigration-Related Violations, 90 Fed. Reg. 27,439 (June 27, 2025). The IFR stripped away the minimal procedures previously in place, replacing them with new “streamlined” processes. For example, it removed the ability to appeal, and it halved the amount of time people have to respond. When the IFR was promulgated in late June, the agencies had assessed approximately 10,000 of these penalties. This has more than doubled as a result of the IFR. As of August 2025, 21,500 people had been assessed an immigration fine, totaling $6 billion of outstanding debt. Jack Morphet, ICE Has Fined Immigrants $6 Billion. Now It’s Coming to Collect, Wall Street Journal (Aug. 26, 2025), available at https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/ice-immigrant-fine-collection-db1a3610?msockid=0a969b83a77a62da15b48f6ca6e36320.
Upon learning about these fines, Public Justice and its partners developed a practice advisory and model briefs to help attorneys and pro se individuals respond to these fines, available at https://noimmigrationfines.org. We then filed a putative class action lawsuit in federal court, arguing that both the imposition of the fines and the promulgation of the IFR violate the APA and several constitutional rights. We represent two immigrant women who have pending petitions for relief that would allow them to become lawful permanent residents (i.e., green card holders), but who were nonetheless incorrectly assessed fines for willful failure to depart. Both of our plaintiffs had to proceed under pseudonyms for fear of retaliation, and both of our plaintiffs cannot afford to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars that DHS says they owe. We also represent the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (“ILRC”), an organization that serves immigrants and immigration attorneys around the country, in challenging the procedural violations that resulted due to the promulgation of the IFR.