Brush fires in Miami-Dade County forced an ICE detention facility to evacuate people. The evacuation also exposed a larger problem in federal court: the Department of Justice told U.S. District Judge Michael Moore that ICE had recently moved an estimated 116 detainees out of South Florida in direct violation of court orders, according to WLRN.
The first number presented to Moore was 47. Those detainees had been sent outside the Southern District of Florida after the fires. Once Moore ordered a broader review, DOJ attorneys reported the higher estimate. WLRN reported that some violations had not been disclosed to the court until Moore started asking.
The mechanics are not complicated. When detained migrants have pending habeas corpus petitions in the Southern District of Florida, court orders can require the government to keep them within reach of that court or notify the judge before moving them. Moore said ICE and DOJ did not do that, and that some transfers had nothing to do with the fire evacuation.
“I don’t want you to hide behind the brushfire, because there are cases that didn’t have to do with the brushfire,” Moore told ICE and DOJ lawyers, according to WLRN. “There have been a number of transfers over the previous months that had nothing to do with the brushfires.”
Moore also said some detainees had been sent to other states, and some had been “removed from the United States” despite court orders, WLRN reported.
The fight sits inside a larger dispute over bond hearings for detained migrants. The Eleventh Circuit ruled two months ago that the government must provide bond hearings to detained migrants. In Moore’s courtroom, DOJ attorney Matthew Feely said the Southern District of Florida office has been overwhelmed by habeas petitions because the Department of Homeland Security has taken the position that it does not have to offer bond hearings to immigrant detainees, according to WLRN.
Feely gave Moore the scale of the filing surge. He said there were 23 habeas petitions in the district in 2022 and 31 in 2023. Between June 2025 and July 10, 2026, he said, there were about 1,800. Feely also told the court that the number of attorneys handling civil cases in the Southern District of Florida had fallen by 40 percent since last year.
“We’re struggling here, your honor,” Feely said, while adding that DOJ was trying to hire for vacant positions, according to WLRN.
Moore, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, did not treat staffing as an answer to the court-order problem. “I’m sympathetic, but it looks like a crisis of your own making,” Moore said. “If you didn’t advance these legal theories you would not be getting sued.”
The hearing put a plain administrative fact on the record: court orders in immigration detention cases are only useful if ICE and DOJ obey them, or at least tell judges when they cannot. Moore’s review found that the failures were broader than a fire-driven emergency, and the government’s own lawyers tied the caseload to DHS’s refusal to provide bond hearings without being sued.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
