Trump Ordered Immigration Fines; DHS Fined a Woman Under ICE Supervision $1.82 Million

A Million-Dollar Bill for a Woman Under ICE Supervision

DHS issued and affirmed a $1.82 million fine against Nancy M. for failing to leave the United States while she was living here under an ICE order of supervision.¹ She later received an immigrant visa and became a lawful permanent resident.¹

Trump ordered the fines campaign. On January 20, 2025, he directed DHS, working with Treasury, to take "all appropriate action to ensure the assessment and collection of all fines and penalties" the law authorized against people unlawfully present.² His agencies chose the method: a DHS and DOJ rule that removed opportunities to challenge a fine.³ On September 30, 2026, Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. found that their mass fines process likely violated the law by skipping individual consideration of whether each person willfully or voluntarily failed to leave, and he stayed the rule and every fine issued under it.¹⁴ That is the charge: Trump's agencies pursued mass financial penalties through a process a judge found likely unlawful, exposing people such as Nancy to debt far beyond their means.¹

Trump also backed the financial threat himself: his May 9, 2025 Project Homecoming proclamation directed agencies to advertise the consequences of staying, including:⁵

Proclamation establishing Project Homecoming, section 3(a)⁵

the garnishment of wages; and the confiscation of savings and personal property, including homes and vehicles.

DHS also announced an ad campaign urging people it described as illegally present to leave, a campaign examined separately in the Noem article.⁶

A Fine First, a Challenge Afterward

The June 27, 2025 rule let DHS skip the notice that it intended to fine someone and issue a decision imposing the fine.³ The recipient then had 15 business days to appeal, down from 30 days to respond, with no extensions.³ The decision could come by regular mail, in-person interviews were gone, and an appeal went to a DHS supervisor instead of the Board of Immigration Appeals.³ The agencies put the rule into effect that day and invited comments afterward, through July 28.³

Congress had authorized these fines for willfully failing to leave after a final removal order, at up to $998 a day after inflation, and for voluntarily failing to leave after a voluntary departure order.¹ O'Toole found that the new process instead inferred a violation from a person's continued presence, imposed the fine, and left the recipient to challenge it.¹ The plaintiffs, he concluded, were likely to prove that this effectively read the words willfully and voluntarily out of the statutes.¹

Roughly $36 Billion Assessed, With Workers Facing Ruin

In his September 30 opinion, O'Toole cited over 65,000 penalties assessed, roughly $36 billion.¹ That counts bills issued across the whole program, not money collected, and the opinion does not say every one came under the stayed rule.¹³⁴

The final rule filed October 9 supplied a later agency tally: DHS reported approximately 110,000 ICE failure-to-depart penalties and another 66,000 CBP unlawful-entry penalties issued under the June rule through September 14, 2026. Those are the agencies' figures, not the count in the judge's opinion.⁷

Maria L., the other individual plaintiff, was a nail technician on a variable salary, fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.¹ The opinion described her as a victim of political violence in her home country and recounted her sworn report that the fine affected her health, increased her anxiety, caused depression, and cost her a month of work.¹ Nancy, a laborer working more than sixty hours a week at two jobs, reported serious anxiety that interfered with her ability to sleep and eat.¹

O'Toole found that assessing and collecting these amounts would push the two women into insolvency.¹ He listed what could follow: garnishment of wages and bank accounts, loss of homes and vehicles, collection lawsuits, and immigration consequences.¹ For other recipients, collection had already begun: declarations the opinion cited reported lawsuits, a seized joint tax refund, debt-collector notices, and damaged credit.¹

The agencies said more fines, imposed faster, would encourage compliance with removal and voluntary departure orders.³ DHS said it was already rescinding fines for people who voluntarily left through the CBP Home app, and intended that policy to encourage departures even among people unable to pay.³

DHS had tried this before. The rule acknowledged that the department abandoned an earlier fines effort in 2021 after finding that fines did not encourage departures; ICE had found that imposing them cost more than it could collect.³ DHS argued in 2025 that the earlier effort's 26 active penalties were too small a sample to establish ineffectiveness, and that faster, wider use, departure incentives and improved collections would address those problems.³ Those were predictions. By the September ruling, the documented result was tens of thousands of penalties and financial harm.³¹ More bills demonstrated expanded use of fines, not that the departure incentive worked.³¹

In the final rule filed October 9, DHS reported over 82,000 self-departures among people with removal or voluntary departure orders from March 2025 through September 14, 2026, including over 7,700 after a civil penalty. DHS compared about 540 departures after a penalty during March 26-June 26, 2025 with about 7,180 during June 27, 2025-September 14, 2026, and argued that the fines were encouraging departure. Those are agency-reported results over unequal periods; the comparison does not isolate the fines' effect from other enforcement or departure incentives.⁷

The Government's Defense and Why It Lost

The government argued that Congress authorized the fines, that immigration records usually made liability straightforward, and that an older process designed for carrier penalties wasted enforcement resources.³ The rule kept some protections: a different DHS supervisory officer reviewed written appeals, decisions had to explain their reasons, and a fine stayed inoperative during the appeal period and a timely appeal.³ DHS could reopen a decision to reduce or rescind a fine, but recipients were expressly barred from seeking reopening or reconsideration.³ DHS also claimed it made individual assessments in each case.¹

In its October 9 final-rule filing, DHS added that recipients had prevailed in 25 percent of appeals it had decided under the new process. It also reported a rise from 222 written challenges to 12,135 notices under the old process, less than 2 percent, to 3,072 appeals against about 110,000 failure-to-depart penalties under the new process, nearly 3 percent. DHS cited those results as evidence that the appeal process was meaningful; the September 30 opinion predates this filing.⁷

O'Toole answered that DHS supplied no relevant details and no actual example in which it considered a person's circumstances and found that a failure to leave was not willful or voluntary.¹ The fine forms contained no specific allegations explaining the punishable conduct.¹ Starting nearly 10,000 fine notices between March and June 2025, he wrote, "belies an argument that each of those circumstances were individually evaluated for willfulness or voluntariness."¹ He pointed to Nancy: fined as willful while under an order of supervision, and since admitted as a lawful permanent resident.¹

The government also argued that it could skip public comment because the changes were procedural and involved foreign affairs.¹³ O'Toole found the plaintiffs likely to win on that claim too: the rule penalized people in the United States, and removing advance notice and shortening appeals affected their rights.¹ He accepted that regular-mail service could be routine administration.¹ Of the shortened appeal deadline he wrote: "That provision seems to be essentially punitive."¹

The government argued that courts could undo the fines later if the plaintiffs won.¹ O'Toole found that vacating a debt after insolvency and collateral losses would not necessarily restore their lives.¹

A Stay in Force, and the Charge That Remains

As of October 10, 2026, the September 30 stay remained in force: it suspended the June rule and all fines issued under it pending another court order.⁴⁸

On October 9, nine days after the stay, DHS and DOJ filed a final rule scheduled for publication and intended effect on October 14.⁷⁹ It retained the June process with one change: ICE would have to accept a late appeal if it found that mail delay beyond the recipient's control caused the missed deadline.⁷ The agencies acknowledged the stay but maintained that the final rule could take effect on publication.⁷ That filing did not itself lift the court's stay.⁷⁴

O'Toole had not decided the lawsuit's final outcome, the stay canceled no debt and no removal order, and he said DHS could keep pursuing fines through its earlier procedures and collect stayed penalties later if they survived review.¹⁴⁸ The government also won a procedural point: he refused to make it hand over its rulemaking records on the faster schedule the plaintiffs requested.⁸ What he stopped was the shortcut.¹

Trump ordered the fines campaign and publicly backed threats to people's wages and property.²⁵ His agencies removed the safeguards for contesting the bills, which ran to $1.82 million for a laborer under ICE supervision.³¹ A federal judge found the mass process likely unlawful and that collection would push her and a nail technician into insolvency.¹ Using government debt to pressure people to leave while skipping the individual assessment Congress required is an abuse of public power.⁵³¹ While the lawsuit continues, the stay keeps fines issued under that shortcut from being collected.⁴