The Justice Department has acknowledged errors in many cases.

Jose Ojeda Duarte’s wife sensed something had gone terribly wrong. She had just searched his name in ICE’s detainee locator and discovered he had disappeared.

Hours earlier, at 3 a.m., Ojeda told POLITICO, ICE officers had roused him abruptly. “Let’s go, you’re going to court,” Ojeda recalled the officers telling him.

“Liars,” he said. “They were taking me to Arizona to send me back to Venezuela.”

Ojeda spent seven months in four detention facilities before he was deported to Venezuela — the country he fled after serving in the military under the Maduro regime — even though he had a pending application for asylum in the U.S. and there was no final order for his removal. The Trump administration would eventually acknowledge he shouldn’t have been deported, attributing the mistake to a “data quality issue.”

Once exceedingly rare, illegal deportations have become a routine part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push — the most extreme consequences of the administration’s incursion on the due process rights of its deportation targets.

Since last year, judges have ruled that the Trump administration has deported more than 170 people in in violation of court orders, in defiance of legally mandated due process protections, or to countries from which they had sought or received protection from torture and persecution. Most of those came in one operation last year, but POLITICO has tracked nearly 30 individual cases since then — including at least three in the past week.

In most cases, judges have ordered the administration to “facilitate” the return of those improperly deported.

“When issued a court order to return a removed alien to the United States, DHS takes every reasonable step to ensure that they are safely brought back for continued immigration proceedings and to guarantee public safety,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement. “We are a nation of laws, and we follow the law, even when activist judges warp it for political purposes.”

DHS criticized “radical NGOs” and “activist judges” for the wave of litigation over wrongful deportations but declined to comment on why such cases are becoming more frequent.

Attorneys who represent ICE detainees say the reason for the increase is simple.

“The machine is running at 110 percent,” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a Maryland-based immigration lawyer. He represents Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported to El Salvador last year despite an immigration judge’s finding that he was likely to be targeted by a dangerous gang there.

Sandoval-Moshenberg said before 2025, he had handled around three illegal deportation cases in a 17-year career. Now, his firm takes on about three per month. It has set up a new, dedicated practice area to “facilitate the return” of people deported in violation of the law, due process or court orders.

Other attorneys say the Trump administration’s headlong rush to deport as many people as possible — stretching the immigration and legal systems to their limits in the process — has resulted in blunders, carelessness and in some cases, outright defiance.

“They’re in such a hurry to kick people out and expel people from the United States that they aren’t actually looking at the legality of some of this stuff,” said Javier Rivera, whose client was deported to Nicaragua last month despite legal protections from deportation due to her status as a victim of domestic violence. A federal judge has ordered her return.

On the same day, another federal judge ordered the return of Esteban Rios Sosa, who was arrested and quickly deported to Mexico while visiting his pregnant daughter at Camp Pendleton. Rios Sosa, who lived in Oceanside, Calif., since 1988, has two children who are U.S. citizens, one of whom served in the Marine Corps, as well as three grandchildren who are U.S. citizens. And he was subject to an active grant of “deferred action” — a form of protection from deportation — when immigration officials detained him.

"This administration has reneged on commitments the government previously made to protect people like Mr. Rios Sosa,” his attorney, Monika Langarica, said.

The Trump administration has at times blamed the “unprecedented onslaught” of immigration cases — a direct result of the president’s mass deportation push — as a culprit for wrongful deportations.

The Justice Department and ICE often acknowledge their errors in court papers, saying improper deportations were the result of administrative failures — like the case of Any Lopez Belloza, a college student who was deported to Honduras last year in violation of a court order . A Massachusetts ICE officer said he was under the “mistaken impression” that he did not need to alert counterparts across state lines to the court order protecting Lopez Belloza.

ICE cited similar technical snafus as the culprit in other improper deportations: an erroneous notation in a detainee’s immigration file; a failure by ICE officials to pass along a court order to those handling removal operations; an “oversight” that left a court order barring deportation out of a detainee’s file. At times, the agency has assured judges it’s working to update internal systems to ensure such mistakes never happen again.

Judges from across the ideological spectrum, including at least three Trump appointees, have ordered the administration to return people to the U.S. who were wrongly deported. The administration has worked to rectify errors in some cases but has resisted in others, saying cases about detention are moot because the former detainees are no longer in U.S. custody or that returning them would intrude on sensitive diplomatic relations.

The Trump administration “may not ‘deport first, litigate later,’” Utah-based U.S. District Judge Jill Parrish scolded in a February order. Asked about that case, DHS emphasized that Parrish is an Obama appointee and that the man who was deported had a history of arrests for DUI and driving without a license. He also had been deported several times before.

While some cases, like Abrego’s and Lopez Belloza’s, have made national headlines, most have churned through the court system without much attention. Among them:

— A 50-year-old man with profound mental disabilities — he had the intellectual capacity of a 4-year-old, according to court filings — was picked up by ICE last summer and sent to Mexico with no notice provided to his caregivers. The man, who had never had any deportation proceedings pending against him, purportedly signed a “voluntary departure” form. The Trump administration attempted to return the man to the U.S. this spring but indicated it would keep him in ICE detention. A judge ordered his immediate release, citing an “egregious lack of due process” and potential for “unique emotional and psychological injuries due to his disabilities.”

— A DACA recipient who arrived in the U.S. from Mexico in 1998, as a 15-year-old and is now the mother of a 22-year-old U.S. citizen daughter. At a hearing on her attempt to obtain lawful status, she was informed that a deportation order had been entered against her 27 years earlier, shortly after her arrival in the U.S. By the next morning, she had been deported to Mexico. U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins said the deportation of someone with active DACA status was a violation of due process. “Each day Petitioner remains unlawfully separated from her daughter, they both suffer unimaginable irreparable harm,” Coggins wrote.

Calling Coggins a “Biden-appointed activist judge,” DHS said that DACA “does not confer any form of legal status in the country” and that recipients “may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons.”

— 12-year-old U.S. citizen twins who were deported to Guatemala, just hours after accompanying their mother to an ICE check-in. Though their mother was properly deported, she had elected to leave her children in the U.S. under the care of their grandmother. A judge ordered their immediate return, and the Trump administration complied in about 24 hours. The judge praised the Trump administration for its “good faith effort” to return the twins

— A Mexican man who lived in the U.S. for 26 years without any criminal record before ICE arrested him at a Walmart in Minnesota and whisked him to El Paso. Despite a federal judge’s order to return him to Minnesota, ICE resisted and several days later bused him to the border crossing to Mexico for his deportation. Though the administration said the man had signed a voluntary departure agreement, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan said the agreement — whose validity was in dispute — could not supersede his order.

Challenges after returning

Ojeda’s return to the U.S. was comparatively smooth. On April 15, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return, and he was brought back on June 1. Four days later, the same judge ordered ICE to provide him a bond hearing before an immigration court. And by June 12, Ojeda had won release on bond, returning home to his family after nine months apart. His wife “moved heaven and earth” to bring him back, Ojeda said, noting that she did it while taking care of their kids and without income from Ojeda, the family’s sole financial provider.

Though it acknowledged in court that it made errors in Ojeda’s case, DHS told POLITICO that he had simply been “removed home to Caracas” and attributed the order to bring him back to “an Obama-era judge.”

“He will receive full due process,” the department spokesperson said. “Despite a historic number of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly and overtime to remove aliens like this from our streets and to their final destination—home.”

Several other ICE deportees have been returned to the U.S. under court order and released to their families. Most, like Ojeda, still face deportation proceedings and long roads to the prospect of legal permission to remain in the country.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who handled the Abrego case, found the Trump administration to be more compliant this past summer, after it deported a a man who arrived in the U.S. as a minor and was granted protection from deportation due to an abusive father.

Xinis ordered the administration to return the man to the U.S. on June 17. By July 5, the Justice Department informed the court that the 19-year-old “is happy to be back home and very grateful to have this opportunity to continue on his journey to Legal Permanent Residency.”

But at least two people, including Lopez Belloza, have declined to accept ICE’s offer of return, fearing that they would be immediately detained upon arrival and could spend months in immigration facilities — which could end with yet another deportation. Others were detained upon their arrival in their destinations and remain largely out of reach of their lawyers or U.S. courts’ ability to compel their return.

Sandoval-Moshenberg said he has two clients who remain detained in El Salvador and said he has little hope of helping them unless a local lawyer can first secure their release from Salvadoran custody.

And Ojeda said that despite his return, his life is still in turmoil with the constant threat of deportation looming.

“I’m a worker here in the U.S. I’m honorable. I’m responsible,” Ojeda said. “I’m really happy to be back — sharing with my family, eating well, moving forward and trying to help my family … and now I’m getting to it, to get legal status.”