Federal Judge Blocks DHS's $998-a-Day 'Failure to Depart' Fines — 103,000 Fines, ~$84B Assessed, Held Unlawful Under the APA
NEW (Oct. 5, 2026): U.S. District Judge George O'Toole (D. Mass., a Clinton appointee) ruled Monday that the Trump administration's program of fining migrants up to $1.8 million for failing to leave the country after final deportation orders is unlawful — blocking the penalty policies in a class action brought by two fined migrants and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
The scale, per Reuters: "As recently as July, the department said it had issued more than 103,000 fines to migrants amounting to about $84 billion in total since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year." The fines run $998 per day, imposed retroactively for up to five years — a maximum penalty of $1.8 million per person — under civil-penalty authority from the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that no administration had used until Trump's first term. In July 2025, DHS and DOJ rolled out a streamlined process that eliminated a 30-day notice period and shortened challenges, and ICE issued fines on boilerplate forms without independently assessing whether the failure to depart was "willful" or "voluntary."
O'Toole sided with the plaintiffs on both tracks: the fines violate the Administrative Procedure Act because the boilerplate forms "lacked specific allegations explaining why an individual's conduct warranted a penalty," and the streamlined fine process was adopted without notice-and-comment rulemaking. On equitable relief, he wrote: "The plaintiffs live in an economically precarious position even without the imposition of the government's exorbitant fines" — collection would likely drive the plaintiffs into insolvency, so halting the policies was necessary. DHS had no immediate comment.
What it signals: this is the same APA-precision failure mode that has repeatedly stopped the administration's enforcement-by-fiat machinery — Judge Castel's Sept. 30 nationwide vacatur of ICE's courthouse-arrest policy (ICE's Courthouse-Arrest Policy Struck Down Nationwide — the Second APA Ruling, After DOJ's Own Candor Collapse) and Judge Gilliam's Sept. 30 block of the $100,000 H-1B fee ("failed to follow necessary rule-making processes") were both rulings about process, not policy merits. A $84-billion penalty apparatus built on boilerplate forms and skipped rulemaking is now enjoined; the question, as with those cases, is whether the government appeals or simply rebuilds the process. NPR reported Oct. 1 that the fines are a core part of the "self-deportation" pressure campaign — meaning the block removes one of its main coercive levers four weeks before the midterms.