A federal judge in Boston on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s program of fining immigrants $998 for every day they remain in the country after a final deportation order, ruling that the government imposed the penalties unlawfully. The fines, applied retroactively for up to five years, reached $1.8 million per person. As of July, DHS said it had issued more than 103,000 of them, totaling about $84 billion, Reuters reported.
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole issued the decision in a class action brought by two fined immigrants and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. He found that ICE issued the penalties on boilerplate forms and that the administration rewrote its fine procedures last year without the public comment federal law requires. Collecting the fines, he wrote, would drive the plaintiffs into insolvency; they live in an economically precarious position even without the government’s exorbitant penalties.
How the Fines Worked
The penalty comes from a 1996 law that lets the government fine anyone who willfully fails to leave after a removal order. It sat unused for 22 years. The first Trump administration tried it in 2018 against a handful of immigrants living in sanctuary churches, assessed penalties of several hundred thousand dollars each, withdrew them after a legal challenge and substituted smaller ones, and the Biden administration dropped the program in 2021.
The second Trump administration revived it at scale. Starting in spring 2025, ICE began mailing notices to people with old removal orders, counting back from the date the order became final. By June 2025 some 4,500 people had received notices totaling more than $500 million, including a woman fined the full $1.8 million and others who had lived in the country for 25 years. The government never explained how it would collect from people who, almost by definition, have no lawful work authorization and little property.
On June 27, 2025, DHS and the Justice Department published an interim final rule that took effect the same day. It eliminated the 30-day warning that had been required before a fine could be imposed, let ICE serve notices by regular mail instead of certified mail or in person, moved appeals from the Board of Immigration Appeals to DHS itself and cut the time to respond from 30 to 15 business days. The agencies skipped the usual public comment period on the grounds that the old process was too slow for the volume they planned. The volume followed: 103,000 fines in about 18 months, an average of more than $800,000 each.
The administration also tied the fines to its self-deportation push. People who register their departure through the CBP Home app have been promised cancellation of outstanding penalties, which turned the fines into leverage: pay $1.8 million, or leave.
What the Judge Found
The lawsuit made two arguments, and O’Toole accepted both. The first was about the notices themselves. The statute allows a fine only for a willful failure to depart, and the plaintiffs showed that ICE was sending the same form to everyone, with no facts about the individual and no finding that the failure to leave was willful rather than, say, the result of a pending appeal, a medical condition or a country that would not issue travel documents. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, an agency action with no stated reason is arbitrary, and O’Toole held that a fine form with no allegation is exactly that.
The second argument was about the June 2025 rule. Agencies can skip public comment only when they show good cause, and O’Toole found that wanting to issue fines faster is not good cause. The June 2025 rule was therefore adopted unlawfully.
The remedy is an injunction covering the class of people assessed a failure-to-depart fine under the boilerplate process. The government cannot collect those fines or issue new ones the same way while the order stands. What the ruling does not do is strike the underlying statute: Congress authorized the penalty, and nothing stops DHS from going back, doing a proper rulemaking and issuing individualized notices that actually explain why a particular person’s failure to leave was willful. The administration is likely to appeal to the First Circuit.
What This Means If You Received a Fine Notice
If you got one of the 103,000 notices, the government cannot collect on it for now. Do not pay it, do not negotiate a payment plan with ICE, and do not sign anything that acknowledges the debt. The ruling does not erase the fine; it stops enforcement while the case continues. But as of this week the leverage has shifted.
Keep the notice and anything that came with it. The form, the envelope and the date you received it are evidence that you are a member of the class, and class members generally do not need to file anything to be covered. If you have already paid any part of a fine, talk to a lawyer about whether a refund claim is possible; the order does not address refunds, and that question will be litigated.
The fine was never the real danger. A notice means ICE has your address and knows you have a removal order, and the same file that produced the fine can produce an arrest. The ruling changes nothing about your removability. If you have been out of status with an old order, the question to put to an attorney now is whether that order can be reopened, whether conditions in your country have changed enough to support a new claim, or whether you have become eligible for something through family in the years since.
Do not treat the CBP Home fine-cancellation offer as a reason to leave. With the fines blocked, the offer is cancelling a debt the government cannot currently collect, and departing on a removal order triggers a ten-year bar on returning.
If you have a removal order and have not received a notice, expect that a corrected one could still come. The administration has every reason to try again.