immigration updates: July 2, 2025

It’s harder to fight the fines, hundreds of thousands are about to lose their status, the immigration jails are full, and the economy is not happy.

Firstly, the exceptions to Travel Ban 2025 we mentioned last week have been given a little bit of fleshing out by way of a Department of State email response to a Congressional inquiry. As we might expect, these will not be distributed liberally.

“We anticipate that national interest exceptions will be very rare . . . The travel must advance a U.S. national interest . . . There is no application for a national interest exception. That will be considered by the consular officer during the interview.”

less adjudicating, more allegiance

Stephen Miller has been expressing his displeasure with the insufficient zeal with which ICE is arresting and detaining those without criminal records (more below), and the Trump Administration is now subtly prodding the judges to lean in their direction.

While there are no official numbers, it’s likely that most immigration judges are former ICE lawyers. It’s a natural progression. They spend their days in the same courtrooms, keep offices in the same building, work the same cases that the judges process all day long, and they continue on as employees of the federal government—now just making rulings instead of submissions. Most do their jobs quite professionally. Conversely, some come from other areas of law, a small number come from private practice or from the nonprofit sector, and a few have never had anything to do with immigration. But most are former ICE lawyers.

So it’s... something that the Acting Directors of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) system has issued a memorandum to all immigration judges instructing them to stop being so biased in favor of immigrants. In about five months, the Trump Administration has issued, give or take, 33 directives to EOIR, each of which constitutes a slight nudge moving the courts away from being neutral arbiters and administrators of justice and in the direction of serving as an enforcement mechanism—a trend we’ve touched on here, here, and here.

Continuing the trend of eliminating process in favor of punishment, a new rule provides that the civil fines for immigration violations we’ve explained recently (the largest we’ve seen is $1.8 million) will no longer provide any notice, can be sent by regular mail, and foreign nationals have less time to contest the charges. Moreover, they will now be issued by DHS (rather than DOJ). All told: less ability to timely respond and less opportunity to fight.

stuffed jails, stalled economy

On June 27th, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that Temporary Protected Status will be terminated for Haiti, meaning that an estimated 520,000 people (DHS estimates that number to be much lower) will suddenly lose their immigration status, the majority of whom probably don’t have any alternative means of maintaining their status in the U.S. Work permits will remain valid until September 2, 2025. According to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, we can expect this to continue to act as a brake on the economy.

We might assume that a number of them will be joining the 59,000 currently in immigration detention, about half of whom have no criminal record. A Guardian analysis of ICE data estimates that there has been an “807% increase in arrests of people without criminal histories since before Donald Trump’s second inauguration this January.” At this level of overcrowding, health outcomes for both men and women are poor.

USCIS isn’t ghosting you

They just changed their number.

Matthew Blaisdell, Esq.

Sunset Immigration PLLC

219 36th Street, Ste 511

Brooklyn, NY 11232

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