Yet another Democrat-appointed federal judge has issued a specious ruling blocking the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to rid the country of those who are in the U.S. illegally.
A federal judge in Massachusetts on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s system for imposing fines of up to $1.8 million on migrants who remain in the United States after receiving final deportation orders.
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. issued the ruling in Boston as part of a class-action lawsuit brought by two migrants and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s dramatically expanded use of civil immigration penalties.
O’Toole, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, concluded that the administration had unlawfully implemented procedures used to assess the fines and blocked DHS from enforcing penalties imposed through those policies.
“The plaintiffs live in an economically precarious position even without the imposition of the government’s exorbitant fines,” O’Toole wrote, finding that enforcement could push affected migrants into insolvency.
The ruling does not eliminate the federal government’s authority to fine migrants who willfully refuse to comply with final removal orders.
Congress authorized such penalties under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
The law allows the government to impose a daily civil penalty on someone subject to a final removal order who “willfully fails or refuses” to leave the country. The inflation-adjusted maximum is currently $998 per day.
The government did not begin actively imposing the penalties until President Donald Trump’s first administration.
Former President Joe Biden suspended the policy after taking office, but Trump revived it after returning to the White House in January 2025.
The second Trump administration then dramatically expanded enforcement. DHS said in July that it had issued more than 103,000 fines totaling approximately $84 billion since Trump’s return to office.
Some migrants received penalties calculated retroactively for as many as five years, producing individual bills approaching $1.8 million.
The administration also changed how the penalties were assessed.
In June 2025, DHS and the Justice Department issued an interim rule intended to speed up the process.
The changes eliminated the previous 30-day notice period, reduced the time available for administrative appeals, removed some procedural protections and allowed DHS to issue final penalty decisions more quickly.
The administration argued that the changes were necessary to strengthen immigration enforcement and encourage compliance with removal orders.
The plaintiffs argued that DHS had bypassed legally required rulemaking procedures and was issuing massive fines using standardized forms without adequately determining whether each person’s failure to leave was actually “willful,” as the statute requires.
O’Toole agreed, Reuters noted. He found that the administration likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by implementing the new system without first giving the public the required opportunity to comment.
The judge also faulted DHS’s use of boilerplate forms that failed to explain why individual migrants met the statutory requirements for a penalty.
The ruling blocks enforcement of the challenged policies while the litigation continues.
The Massachusetts case is not the first legal challenge to the administration’s multimillion-dollar immigration fines.
In September, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in California separately blocked DHS from collecting a $1.82 million penalty against a Chinese woman subject to a removal order.
Tigar concluded that the government had not adequately demonstrated that her failure to depart was willful.
He also found that she was likely to succeed on her argument that the $1.82 million penalty violated the Constitution’s prohibition against excessive fines, noting that it was more than seven times the maximum criminal fine available for similar conduct.
O’Toole’s ruling goes further because it arose from a class-action challenge and targets the administration’s broader procedures rather than merely one migrant’s penalty.
DHS did not immediately comment on Monday’s decision.
The ruling represents a setback for one element of Trump’s broader immigration enforcement strategy, but it does not prevent the administration from pursuing deportations or from assessing fines through procedures that comply with existing law.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
