As the second Trump Administration pursues its mass deportation agenda, grassroots bond funds are stepping up their work to free community members from immigration jails.
Bond funds nationwide have seen a surge in requests for support this year, as more jailed migrants challenge their detention in federal courts and are granted bond hearings. These courts are one of the few avenues left to migrants seeking release as the federal government works to foreclose other options and grows the population of immigrant detainees to a record high.
According to Elizabeth Nguyen, who coordinates immigration bonds for the National Bail Fund Network, the Trump Administration has weaponized immigration bonds to make it harder for immigrants to fight their cases and remain in the United States. “The trend is that the system is intent on deporting people,” Nguyen tells The Progressive, “and it will use every lever including high bonds, not setting bonds, making it difficult to post an active bond, or making it so that a person has to go through a complicated appeals process.”
The National Bail Fund Network is a project of Community Justice Exchange. It includes more than thirty immigration bond funds nationwide. Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, Nguyen says she’s seen an uptick in community groups launching bond funds and recruiting volunteers. “What we all agree on,” she says, “is that no one should be in a cage.”
The number of detained immigrants in the United States has hit a record high under the second Trump Administration, reaching more than 70,000 people jailed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in January 2026. That number represents a roughly 80 percent increase in the population held in immigration detention since President Joe Biden left office in 2025.
To achieve this rapid increase, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued guidance reinterpreting and decades of precedent to reclassify millions of noncitizens as subject to mandatory detention.
“We are seeing people in detention that we’ve never seen before,” says Michael Tan, deputy director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “People who have lived here for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, many of them have U.S. citizen children, many of them are going through a legal process . . . . Nonetheless, now the Trump Administration is saying, ‘Actually, it turns out you were subject to mandatory detention all along, so we’re going to take you into custody.’ ”
Tan says the move is meant to push desperate people toward so-called self-deportation, for the sake of removing as many migrants as possible from the United States.
“It’s not surprising that we’ve seen this big uptick in people who give up and sort of say, ‘This is my home, but I’m not willing to spend some indefinite period of time behind bars if that’s the price of me fighting for my right to stay in the country,’” says Tan. “And that’s the choice the government is putting to people with this policy.”
Attorneys have found success fighting Trump’s mandatory detention scheme in federal courts. An ongoing Politico of more than 17,800 cases as of mid-July has found that when individuals swept up under the policy challenged their detention, judges from across the ideological spectrum sided with those individuals over the government nearly 90 percent of the time.
The ACLU has also litigated this question in every circuit court where it could be heard, a total of eleven of the nation’s thirteen. Some have concurred with the Trump Administration’s reinterpretation of the law, while others have ruled the mandatory detention scheme unlawful. Tan says he expects the Supreme Court to take up the issue in its next term, which begins in October.
Many of those cases are being brought under habeas corpus, a centuries-old legal procedure through which individuals jailed by the government can challenge their detention before a judge. Beginning in late 2025, after the Trump Administration had foreclosed most other avenues through which jailed migrants might seek release, the number of habeas petitions filed in federal district courts began to climb. Using data from the Free Law Project’s CourtListener database, ProPublica determined that habeas more than 61,000 cases had been filed between January 2025 and mid-July 2026. There were more filed in the first thirteen months of the second Trump Administration than were filed during the past three administrations combined, including Trump’s first. Thousands of the cases have ended with judges ordering bond hearings before an immigration judge.
Posting bond is not only about getting out of detention. Released individuals tend to have better outcomes—not because their cases are necessarily stronger, but because they have more resources to fight them. Studies show that those who are forced to remain in immigration detention until a hearing struggle to find lawyers and are less able to gather evidence to support their case. When a person is released, their immigration case is also moved from the detained docket to the non-detained docket, which often means extra time to build their case.
Even for those granted bond, many can’t afford to pay without accessing support from a bond fund. The minimum an immigration bond can be set at is $1,500. But there is no maximum, and unlike criminal bail, an immigration bond has no Eighth Amendment protection against excessive amounts. Immigration bond is also unlike criminal bail in that it must be paid in full, rather than only a percentage, before a person can be released. Advocates tell The Progressive they have seen higher-than-usual immigration bond amounts since Trump returned to office.
“[In] past years, a median bond in New York was around $10,000, but that has changed so much in the last couple of months, where we see most of the bonds in upstate New York are over $15,000,” says Rosa Santana, co-executive director of Envision Freedom Fund. “It’s another way of trying to keep people inside detention because they know that it is extremely hard for families to come up with $25,000, $20,000, even more so with $75,000 or $85,000.”
Santana says $85,000 is the largest immigration bond that Envision Freedom Fund has helped pay under the second Trump Administration and one of the largest it has seen since the fund began paying immigration bonds in 2018. It has since grown into the nation’s largest immigration bond funds and has paid more than $12 million to free more than 1,300 people in New York and New Jersey. Last year, Santana says, the fund paid 176 immigration bonds. This year, because of the boom in habeas petitions and despite steep bond amounts, it has already paid to free more than 250 people from immigration detention.
Kathleen McTigue, who coordinates the family hotline and legal representative fund at the Boston Immigration Justice Accompanim (BIJAN), tells The Progressive she has also seen a rise in bond amounts. Since 2018, BIJAN has been paying immigration bonds to free people from ICE facilities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as those jailed elsewhere who will return home to Massachusetts after release. “There used to be a standard level for somebody who didn’t have criminal charges, and that was sometimes less than $3,000, but the range was between $3,000 and $7,000,” McTigue says. But now, it’s not unusual to see bonds “as high as $20,000, for no discernible reason.”
During the first five months of this year, BIJAN paid more than $1.5 million in immigration bonds—enough to free more than 160 people.
McTigue says that while the need for support has increased, the local community has also stepped up to meet it. When the fund ran dry in early May, BIJAN sent an emergency appeal to its mailing list and raised about $100,000 in less than a week to support the community members on its waiting list. “I think that people give because they know the impact it has,” McTigue says. “Even if it’s just one person that you’re going to contribute to, that’s one more person who gets to be with their family again.”
The ballooning need for support has also brought new immigration bond funds into the National Bail Fund Network. Among them is a bond fund launched last year by Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE Justice). The group has been organizing with immigrant workers in Southern California since 1997 and saw the need for a local bond fund when federal agents descended on Los Angeles in June 2025, abducting more than 1,300 people during the violent months-long operation, according to reports from community members compiled and verified by L.A. Taco.
Within days of announcing its bond fund, CLUE Justice had raised about $600,000 from more than 6,000 individual donors. “The raids were so violent, and it was so clear that this was going to be a need that we got a whole lot of donations right off the bat,” says CLUE Justice Executive Director Jennifer Gutierrez. The fund paid its first bond in September 2025 and, as of May 2026, has raised and paid out more than $1.5 million in bonds—enough to bring more than 150 community members home.
Gutierrez says the organization was able to launch its fund so quickly thanks to its deep roots in the community as well as training and support from the National Bail Fund Network and a new wave of local volunteers, many of them retirees or teachers on summer break, who felt called to help their neighbors. “They saw what was happening in the news and wanted to do something,” she says. “They were seeing neighbors being picked up. They were seeing it on the streets. It was not something you could ignore.”
Nguyen of the National Bail Fund Network recommends that organizers who do not already have immigration bond funds in their communities and are interested in launching one look for groups that may be well-situated to do that work, like CLUE Justice was in Southern California. “See who else might already be thinking about the folks in detention,” she says, “because often, even if there’s not a bond fund, there might be a group that’s supporting people inside—sending them commissary money, doing visits, running a pen-pal program. [Or] maybe there’s not an immigration bond fund in your area, but there’s a pretrial bail fund. The first step is seeing who’s already in the mix.” From there, she says, the National Bail Fund Network offers a wealth of resources to help new community-based efforts get off the ground.
McTigue says her advice to other organizers is to not be intimidated by the scale of Trump’s deportation machine and the work that must be done to dismantle it.
“When your government is doing things that appear to you to be wildly unjust,” she says, “you really have a responsibility to get involved in whatever way you can to try to make a difference.”