1. United States
2. Mich.
3. Letter

To my Elected Officials: I am writing to demand urgent legislative action to protect the constitutional right to the writ of habeas corpus and rescue our collapsing federal court system. The executive branch's mass detention policies have triggered an unprecedented judicial crisis. Because individuals are being denied basic bond hearings, civil rights attorneys have been forced to file over 70,000 individual habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. This massive explosion in cases—surpassing the total filings of the last three administrations combined—is being weaponized as a "paper blitz." It intentionally paralyzes federal dockets, exhausts public defenders, and allows fast-tracked deportations to occur before swamped judges can even open a case file. Allowing bureaucratic scale to defeat constitutional checks and balances is unacceptable. I urge you to sponsor and pass legislation to resolve this bottleneck immediately: • Lift Class-Action Restrictions: Amend federal law to explicitly allow immigration defense attorneys to file class-action habeas petitions, resolving thousands of identical detention challenges simultaneously instead of forcing 70,000 individual lawsuits. • Mandate Automatic Judicial Stays: Enact a statutory requirement that halts any deportation or transfer the moment a habeas petition is filed, ensuring the executive branch cannot exploit court backlogs to deport people before a judge reviews their case. • Emergency Judicial Surge Funding:

Allocate emergency funding to deploy magistrate judges and administrative staff to the federal districts facing the heaviest backlogs. The administration must not be allowed to treat our constitutional court system as a resource-depletion game. I expect you to act to protect the rule of law.