Some federal judges are scrambling to decide the fate of thousands in ICE custody. Not in Mississippi

By Mukta Joshi | Originally published by Mississippi Today

Mukta Joshi is an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow examining immigration and criminal justice issues. She can be reached at mukta.joshi@nytimes.com.

As federal courts face a flood of petitions filed by immigrants pleading to be released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, judges around the country have been improvising measures to deal with the overwhelming caseload.

Not in Mississippi. 

U.S. District Court Judge David Bramlette III, who is assigned to handle all habeas corpus petitions filed by immigrant detainees in the state, has not decided a case on its merits since at least October, federal court dockets show. 

Dozens of people who filed habeas corpus petitions have waited months to have their motions decided. Some of them have been held in Mississippi for a year or longer.

Judge Bramlette’s district encompasses Adams County, home to one of the largest ICE detention centers in the nation. In the past eight months, more than 570 immigrant detainees have filed habeas corpus petitions in his court in the Southern District of Mississippi, data collected by the nonprofit Habeas Dockets shows.

Many detainees who filed petitions have since been deported, and Judge Bramlette has dismissed about 18 on procedural grounds. But the others have remained undecided, allowing hundreds of detainees to remain in prison-like conditions without any decision about the constitutionality of their detention.

Last summer, the Trump administration began detaining immigrants who previously had moved freely around the country while they awaited the outcome of their immigration cases. Habeas corpus petitions became one of the only options for these immigrants to seek release. 

Until July 2025, only those apprehended at the border would be detained until their asylum claims were decided. Most people who had lived in the United States for many years would have been allowed to argue for their release on bond if they had been arrested by ICE. 

Habeas corpus allows petitioners to challenge their detention and argue that the government does not have a legal basis to detain them. Many detainees held by ICE have been arguing that they are at least entitled to bond hearings. Others argue that being held without cause beyond six months amounts to indefinite detention, which would violate the Constitution. 

Alexi Canas, a native of El Salvador and a father of eight, had been living in Maryland for 30 years when ICE arrested him in March 2025. An immigration judge offered him protection from deportation, but after spending about seven months in detention, he filed a habeas petition through a lawyer in October. The petition asked the judge to set bond so Canas could be released while he waited for his immigration case to be finally decided. Records show that he has now spent more than a year in Natchez, in the Adams County Correctional Center. 

An Afghan detainee, Azizurahman Karokhi, wrote out a petition by hand in December saying he remained in custody more than seven months after a judge ordered his deportation. ICE agents told him “the ball is in your country’s court,” because the government of Afghanistan had failed to issue a transportation letter, according to the habeas petition, which Karokhi filed without a lawyer. 

Canas and Karokhi’s habeas corpus petitions are two of more than 57,000 that have been filed across the nation. Had ICE placed them in a detention center outside of Mississippi, a judge might have ruled on their petitions, and potentially granted them bond to get out.  

Immigration lawyers and civil rights organizations in Mississippi have been pushing Judge Bramlette — who has closed fewer than 3 percent of habeas cases — to break the standstill in his court. In March, they sent a letter to the chief judge of Mississippi’s Southern District court proposing solutions by referring to steps taken by courts in other states. 

D. Korbin Felder, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which endorsed the letter, said the judge had not responded. 

On Friday, the federal court issued an order redistributing its case assignment among its judges, after a senior judge retired. Despite the reassignment, however, 100 percent of the cases in the court’s western division remain assigned to Bramlette. 

“A new case assignment order was an opportunity to distribute the workload amongst multiple judges to get quicker resolutions,” Felder said, “but the Southern District of Mississippi continues to be an outlier and move without any urgency despite people’s constitutional rights being at stake.” 

Bramlette did not respond to a request for comment.

Aidar Nafikov, a Russian asylum seeker who filed a habeas petition in April, has been in Adams County for more than 19 months. His wife, Liudmila, said the situation had left her family feeling “exhausted, heartbroken and desperate.” 

“My husband has missed birthdays, holidays, school events and countless important moments in our children’s lives that can never be recovered,” she said.

Some federal courts across the country, including those serving parts of Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska, have decided more than half of the petitions that have come before them since October. Most other courts have decided a third to half of their cases. On average, federal courts have decided about a quarter of all habeas cases, the Habeas Dockets database shows.

In Georgia, one federal judge issued a standing order for all habeas petitions that follow a certain factual pattern, and empowered magistrates under him to grant relief in response to the “administrative judicial emergency” caused by the influx of petitions. As of June 29, that court district had decided more than a third of its habeas cases. 

In the middle district of Louisiana, the chief judge appointed a public defender to assist detainees who were filing without a lawyer, and expanded the pool of judges who could handle habeas petitions. That court has decided about 15 percent of the habeas cases before it. 

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is one of two appellate courts that have upheld Trump’s mandatory detention policy. It covers Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana. In February, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana started pushing to move a detention center away from the state’s middle district jurisdiction, criticizing “liberal judges” there for releasing immigrant detainees by granting their habeas petitions. Two months later, that court prohibited the government from transferring detainees out of its jurisdiction while their cases were pending. 

The impasse in Bramlette’s court has left detainees wondering if they were intentionally transferred to Mississippi to prevent their cases from moving forward. 

When a detainee is moved, they must refile their habeas petition in the local federal courthouse, a process that can quickly become costly. Maria Celeste, whose fiancé was transferred from a Louisiana facility to Adams County, said her fiancé’s lawyers advised against refiling his petition in Mississippi because it would have been “an unnecessary expense.”

Brandon Riches, an immigration attorney based in Ocean Springs who also signed the letter, said he had requested dismissal of many of his clients’ habeas petitions because they waited so long for a judgment that they were deported. 

And some are being held in Adams long after they were ordered deported, trapped in bureaucratic purgatory. Yuk Chon Kwong, a detainee who has been in a high-security unit at Adams for more than a year, said he had been begging to be sent back to Hong Kong, where he is originally from. His mother brought him to the United States in 1970 when he was 12. He was ordered deported in 2010, but Hong Kong refused to accept him. 

He said it seemed no one could give him answers. “You ask them anything, they say, ‘We don’t know, but we have the right to hold you here,’” Kwong said. “Over here, they break me mentally.”

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This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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