A federal judge in Boston has blocked the Trump administration from imposing fines of up to $1.8 million on immigrants who remain in the United States after receiving final deportation orders, finding the penalties were levied unlawfully.
As Reuters reported, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole issued the ruling Monday in a class-action lawsuit brought last year by two of the thousands of people the Department of Homeland Security has hit with civil penalties.
O’Toole, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, sided with the plaintiffs and halted the penalty policies, writing that collecting the fines would likely push those challenging them into insolvency. “The plaintiffs live in an economically precarious position even without the imposition of the government’s exorbitant fines,” he wrote, Reuters reported. DHS had no immediate comment.
The scale of the program the ruling freezes is substantial. As recently as July, DHS said it had issued more than 103,000 fines to immigrants since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, totaling roughly $84 billion, Reuters reported.
The penalties trace to a 1996 law, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which authorized civil fines for people who defy removal orders. According to Reuters, no administration actually sought to impose them until Trump’s first term. His second administration went further, beginning last year to levy fines of $998 a day on those who failed to leave after a deportation order — and applying them retroactively for up to five years, producing a maximum penalty of about $1.8 million per person.
In July 2025, Reuters reported, DHS and the Justice Department rolled out a new process they said would streamline the fines by eliminating a 30-day notice period and shortening the window to challenge a penalty. The plaintiffs — joined by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center — challenged both the change and what they described as ICE’s practice of issuing penalties on boilerplate forms without independently determining whether a person’s failure to leave was “willful” or “voluntary.”
O’Toole agreed on both points.
He held that the fines violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the forms lacked the specific allegations needed to explain why any individual’s conduct warranted a penalty, Reuters reported. He also found the administration failed to follow required rulemaking procedures when it adopted the streamlined process because it did not first give the public a chance to comment on the change.
In plain terms, the decision does not say the government may never fine people who defy removal orders; the 1996 statute still allows civil penalties. The court found that the way this administration imposed them—sweeping, retroactive, and issued through generic forms without individual justification or public rulemaking—did not meet the law’s requirements.
For immigrant families across Greater Boston and beyond, including many in the Haitian and Caribbean communities who have received removal orders amid this year’s enforcement surge, the ruling lifts, at least for now, the threat of financial penalties large enough to erase a household’s savings many times over. Whether the administration appeals remains to be seen.
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Source: Reuters.
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