A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a system that imposed massive civil fines on migrants who remained in the United States after receiving final deportation orders.
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. issued the ruling Monday in Boston as part of a class-action lawsuit brought by two migrants and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
The case challenges the Department of Homeland Security’s expanded use of financial penalties against people who fail to leave the country after being ordered removed.
Under the administration’s system, some migrants faced fines approaching $1.8 million.
O’Toole, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, concluded that the procedures used to assess those penalties were likely implemented unlawfully.
“The plaintiffs live in an economically precarious position even without the imposition of the government’s exorbitant fines,” O’Toole wrote.
He said enforcing the penalties could push affected migrants into insolvency.
The ruling does not eliminate the federal government’s authority to fine people who willfully refuse to comply with final removal orders.
Congress authorized those penalties under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
The law permits the government to impose a daily civil fine on someone subject to a final removal order who “willfully fails or refuses” to leave the country.
The inflation-adjusted maximum is currently $998 per day.
Although the authority has existed for decades, the federal government did not begin actively using the penalties until President Donald Trump’s first administration.
Former President Joe Biden suspended the policy after taking office.
Trump revived it after returning to the White House in January 2025.
His administration then expanded the program significantly.
DHS said in July that it had issued more than 103,000 fines totaling roughly $84 billion since Trump returned to office.
Some of those penalties were calculated retroactively for as many as five years.
That approach produced individual bills nearing $1.8 million.
The administration also changed the process used to assess the fines.
In June 2025, DHS and the Justice Department issued an interim rule intended to make the system move faster.
The changes eliminated the previous 30-day notice period, shortened the time available for administrative appeals and removed some procedural protections.
They also allowed DHS to issue final penalty decisions more quickly.
The administration argued that the changes were necessary to strengthen immigration enforcement and encourage people with final removal orders to comply.
The plaintiffs challenged that approach.
They argued DHS had bypassed legally required rulemaking procedures and was issuing enormous penalties without adequately determining whether each person had actually refused to leave “willfully,” as required by law.
O’Toole agreed with key parts of that argument.
He found that the administration likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by putting the new system in place without first providing the public with the required opportunity to comment, per the Conservative Brief.
The judge also criticized DHS for relying on standardized forms that did not sufficiently explain why individual migrants qualified for penalties.
His order blocks enforcement of the challenged policies while the lawsuit continues.
The Massachusetts case is not the first time the administration’s immigration fines have faced legal trouble.
In September, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in California blocked DHS from collecting a $1.82 million fine from a Chinese woman who had been ordered removed.
Tigar found that the government had not adequately shown that her failure to leave was willful.
He also said she was likely to succeed in arguing that the $1.82 million penalty violated the Constitution’s ban on excessive fines.
The judge noted that the amount was more than seven times the maximum criminal fine available for similar conduct.
O’Toole’s ruling is broader.
Rather than dealing with a single migrant’s penalty, the Massachusetts case challenges the administration’s overall procedures for imposing the fines.
DHS did not immediately comment on the ruling.
The decision creates another legal obstacle for one part of Trump’s immigration enforcement strategy.
It does not stop the administration from deporting people with final removal orders.
It also does not prevent the government from imposing civil fines in the future, as long as those penalties are assessed through procedures that comply with existing law.
