A federal judge in Michigan said the Justice Department used a case citation that does not exist while arguing against an ICE detainee who was trying to post a bond an immigration judge had already granted.
U.S. District Judge Hala Y. Jarbou dismissed the detainee’s habeas petition as moot after the disputed stay on his bond expired. The order still left the government with a public warning: lawyers who use generative AI have to check whether their cited cases are real before sending them to court. That is not a lofty ethics seminar point. In this case, the filing concerned a person’s detention.
According to Jarbou’s order, the detainee filed a habeas petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 after an immigration judge set bond at $35,000. The bond order was then put on hold during an appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.19(i), a rule the detainee argued violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause through its 90-day automatic stay provision.
Before the court reached that constitutional question, the clock ran out. The automatic stay expired while the case was pending. The Justice Department told the court the bond order was back in effect and that the detainee would be released if he posted the $35,000 bond. Jarbou dismissed the habeas case without prejudice.
The citation problem
Jarbou then addressed a separate problem in the government’s earlier response to an order to show cause. The Justice Department had cited “Taylor v. Hott, 724 F. App’x 387, 392 (6th Cir. 2018)” for the proposition that 8 U.S.C. § 1226(e) blocks challenges asking a court to reassess the evidence behind an immigration bond decision or second-guess an immigration judge’s discretion.
The judge said that citation did not check out. The cited page in the Federal Appendix belongs to a different Sixth Circuit decision, Atkins v. CGI Technologies and Solutions, Inc., a commercial arbitration case, according to the order. Jarbou said the court could not find a Sixth Circuit case captioned Taylor v. Hott, or any federal case containing the quoted language.
“Thus, it seems this citation was likely produced by generative artificial intelligence,” Jarbou wrote in the order.
The court did not impose sanctions. Jarbou wrote that attorneys using AI must “scrupulously review” the output to confirm that cited decisions exist and that the citations fairly describe the law. She added that the duty of candor to the court requires it, and said the government must make sure future filings in her court do not contain “nonexistent case law.”
The order does not say which tool, if any, produced the bogus citation. It also does not find that the Justice Department intentionally misled the court. The confirmed fact is narrower and still ugly: government lawyers filed a citation the judge could not verify, in litigation over whether an ICE detainee could challenge continued detention after being granted bond.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.