In late December, law enforcement in Noblesville, Indiana arrested Danna America Coronel-Hernandez for driving without a license. Days later, federal immigration officials shipped the then 22-year old woman, who was five months pregnant, three hours away to a jail in Grayson County, Kentucky to await deportation.
Coronel-Hernandez is one of hundreds of thousands of people swept up in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
She’s also one of more than 20,000 immigrants who are filing habeas corpus petitions in federal courts to challenge their incarceration. And many, including her, are winning.
Nationwide, the number of immigrants filing habeas petitions is skyrocketing, according to a recent report from ProPublica. The petitions are a constitutionally protected mechanism for people to argue their detention is illegal.
The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and WKU Public Radio examined more than 60 habeas petitions for incarcerated immigrants that were resolved in the Western District of Kentucky from Jan. 21, 2025 – the day after Trump’s second inauguration as president – through Feb. 9, 2026.
Judges in the Western District granted about 3 out of 4 of the petitions, according to court files. The rest were dismissed or deemed moot — because either the person was released from jail or deported before a judge ruled on their habeas petition, or a person voluntarily agreed to drop the case. The judges who ruled on the petitions did not respond to an interview request.
Nearly 100 cases were still pending as of Feb. 9, with more petitions filed since then.
In the Eastern District of Kentucky, immigrants have filed nearly 80 habeas petitions since last September, according to a recent report from WVXU in Cincinnati. Nearly all are undecided.
More than 80% of the petitions reviewed by KyCIR and WKU Public Radio argued that a new mandatory detention policy, instituted by Trump, has violated the rights of immigrants held in Kentucky jails.
The policy instructs officials to treat even long-time residents as “applicants for admission” who should be detained while their deportation case is pending. That status, until now, has typically been reserved for recent immigrants and individuals detained near a U.S. border. But now it’s applied to countless more immigrants the Trump administration wants to deport, including those nowhere near a border and regardless of how long they’ve lived here. By changing how those long-term immigrants are classified, the Trump administration argues they are no longer entitled to a bond hearing for release.
The new policy marks a stark change to longstanding immigration legal norms, said Colleen Cowgill, an attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center, a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrants.
“People who have always had a right to a bond hearing are suddenly being found ineligible for bond,” she said.
Cowgill works on habeas cases for Illinois residents, some of whom are being held in Kentucky jails. She said keeping immigrants detained indefinitely is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to wear down people in jail.
“And I think definitely part of the administration’s strategy is to almost force people, in a way, to make this decision of remaining detained and fighting their case or accepting removal [deportation],” she said.
Cowgill said getting out of jail and back home is important for immigrants looking to access “long-term solutions” to remain in the country.
“They want their freedom back,” she said. “They want to be with their family, their children. And so the habeas petitions are really giving us a way to meet that need.”
‘It is happening’
The Western District of Kentucky spans west from Oldham County down to Clinton County and encompasses several jails that hold immigrants detained by ICE. It has seven district judges and four magistrate judges.
Only four decided the outcomes in the petitions reviewed by KyCIR and WKU Public Radio. Of those, President Barack Obama appointed judges David J. Hale and Greg N. Stivers. Trump appointed Claria H. Boom and Rebecca Grady Jennings.
When immigrants’ habeas petitions were granted, the judges typically ordered their immediate release from jail.
More than 75% of the immigrants filing now-resolved petitions with Western District judges were held in one of two jails: Either the Grayson County Detention Center in Leitchfield or the Hopkins County Jail in Madisonville. Others were locked up in the Casey, Christian, Daviess or Oldham county jails.
Before they were detained by federal immigration authorities, court records show 24 of the immigrants were living in Illinois. Several others were living in Indiana or Kentucky, plus one person from California and another from Minnesota. A home state is not listed for more than a dozen of the immigrants.
Nearly 40% of the immigrants came to America within the past five years, whereas more than half of them have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade. At least seven arrived in the U.S. when they were children, according to court records.
The immigrants came from across the world: Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, Mauritania and Guatemala. At least five were found, by U.S. officials, to have “credible fear” of danger, including persecution or even torture, if they returned to their previous country.
Some of the immigrants noted in their petition to the judge that they have no criminal history.
In the case of Danna America Coronel-Hernandez, her attorney said she’s lived in the U.S. for 16 years, since she was six years old. She’s building a family here.
“She’s a young lady, never had any encounters with the law, pregnant and engaged to a U.S. citizen – there’s no reason she should be in jail,” said immigration attorney Karen Weinstock, who represented her.
Still, she sat for nearly a month in Grayson County jail without a chance to post bail.
“It’s not legal, it’s not constitutional, but it is happening,” Weinstock said.
A new policy under scrutiny
Under the Trump administration’s new mandatory detention policy, federal officials look to indefinitely keep immigrants like Coronel-Hernandez behind bars, without letting a judge consider releasing them on bond while their deportation case is pending.
“They don’t care about any particular circumstances or mitigating factors in somebody’s situation. They just detain everybody, giving individual discretion to the officer who is arresting whether to detain or not detain,” Weinstock said. “Up until this administration, the vast majority of non-citizens who were in removal proceedings or were encountered by law enforcement or by immigration [agents] who don’t have criminal histories were not detained for the removal process.”
Weinstock said a September decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled immigration judges do not have authority to grant bonds in these situations – another move that upended decades of legal precedent.
Many immigrants argue the Trump administration wrongly applied the mandatory detention policy to them personally, putting them behind bars indefinitely in violation of their due process rights.
In Coronel-Hernandez’s habeas petition, she argued she should not face the same mandatory detention process as a newly arrived immigrant in the U.S., as well as that she had begun facing health complications related to her pregnancy while in detention. She won and was released from jail at the end of January, but further proceedings will determine if she will be allowed to remain in the U.S.
Sarah Eads Adkins is an immigration attorney at a private firm based in Newport. Her work rarely involved petitions of habeas corpus until the Trump administration’s crackdown.
“A lot has changed in the past year,” she said.
Eads Adkins said many of her clients have no criminal history, aren’t a flight risk and therefore have legitimate asylum claims and the right to make their case before a judge. Even if they are inevitably deported, being released before immigration proceedings gives them a chance to get their affairs in order, she said.
“Many of them have kids. They have moms and dads and aunts and uncles that are in the United States. They have houses that they either rent or own, and even getting a few more months before they’re eventually deported to wrap up their logistics at home makes a huge difference,” Eads Adkins said.
Eads Adkins foresees an inevitable case before the U.S. Supreme Court in which these policies are put to the highest test. That may come from an embattled declaratory judgment made in a case titled Maldonado Bautista v. Department of Homeland Security. The ruling was repeatedly referenced in petitions across the Western District.
Last November, a California judge rejected ICE’s policy of mandatory detainment and its efforts to treat long-term residents the same as newly arrived immigrants. The order reiterated that such residents are entitled to bond hearings, regardless of the Trump administration’s insistence otherwise.
That decision is currently on appeal in California’s Ninth Circuit, often considered to favor more liberal decisions. Eads Adkins predicts they’ll likely uphold the rejection of ICE’s policy, leading to another appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“If it gets to the Supreme Court, I imagine that it would go the other way, just because right now the Supreme Court is more conservative-leaning,” she said.
She added the impact would be widespread and add more strain to the country’s already overburdened immigration system as jails continue to fill and more people face deportations.
“These are people that are living here, contributing to our economy,” she said. “Their kids live here. And they’re either going to be in prison or back in their home country.”
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