How many federal lawsuits were filed against ICE in 2020 and earlier for trend comparison?
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Executive summary
The available reporting does not provide a definitive, single-number tally of all federal lawsuits filed against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2020 and earlier; public trackers and advocacy groups document many high-profile cases and a surge in immigration-related litigation since 2017, but none of the supplied sources offers a complete pre‑2021 count [1] [2] [3]. What the record does show is a sustained increase in civil suits challenging ICE and broader DHS policies during the Trump years and continuing into 2020, with multiple institutional trackers and plaintiff organizations cataloguing dozens—if not hundreds—of individual filings [1] [2] [4].
1. What the sources actually report about litigation volume
At least one independent data point shows a rapid uptick in immigration‑related civil litigation early in the Trump administration: TRAC documented 763 new civil immigration lawsuits filed between January 20 and the end of March 2017, signaling immediate and intensive legal pushback to federal immigration policy changes—though that figure covers immigration litigation broadly and is not limited strictly to suits naming ICE as a defendant [2]. The Justice Action Center’s Litigation Tracker and advocacy organizations such as the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and the ACLU list many discrete cases and class actions challenging ICE or DHS practices—examples include FOIA suits, detainer challenges, and actions over detention conditions—but those sources serve as catalogs rather than an audited numerical total of all federal suits through 2020 [1] [3] [4].
2. High‑profile exemplars and what they indicate about trends
Several emblematic cases illustrate the contours of the litigation wave: long‑running class actions like Gonzalez v. ICE—filed by ACLU affiliates and resolved in key rulings in 2020—targeted ICE detainer practices and culminated in a permanent injunction, demonstrating how individual suits could produce systemwide remedies and fuel further litigation strategies by plaintiffs’ counsels [5]. Impact litigation groups and national coalitions regularly brought suits seeking to block or undo agency policies (for instance, challenges to parole and custody rules or FOIA delays), suggesting strategic prioritization of test cases and class actions rather than single plaintiff tort claims alone [1] [3].
3. Limits of the available evidence and why a single number is missing
None of the provided pages publishes an exhaustively aggregated count of federal lawsuits naming ICE up through 2020; the Litigation Tracker documents dozens of cases but is organized by docket and topic, TRAC reports aggregate immigration filings for narrow windows, and advocacy sites highlight selected cases and settlements rather than delivering a comprehensive tally [1] [2] [3]. Because “lawsuits against ICE” can mean different things—individual constitutional claims, FTCA tort claims, FOIA suits, class actions against DHS components that include ICE, or cases where ICE is a co‑defendant—assembling a defensible total requires systematic PACER queries or a meta‑analysis of legal trackers that these sources do not provide [1] [3].
4. Competing narratives, hidden agendas, and how to interpret the fragmentary data
Advocacy groups emphasize litigation counts and victories to demonstrate agency overreach and mobilize donors and legislators, while government summaries (such as agency legal notices) tend to frame suits as routine or contestable—readers should recognize that trackers aligned with plaintiffs will spotlight impact cases, potentially amplifying the perception of volume without an audited total [1] [6]. Conversely, outlets that report immigration litigation as a broad category (TRAC’s early 2017 spike) may conflate suits against DHS, CBP, or USCIS with those naming ICE specifically, which can skew trend comparisons unless definitions are harmonized [2] [3].
5. Bottom line for trend comparison and next steps for a precise count
Based on the supplied material, the best-supported conclusion is that litigation targeting ICE and DHS surged beginning in 2017 and continued through 2020, producing hundreds of immigration‑related filings in short windows (e.g., 763 new civil immigration suits in early 2017), but no definitive aggregate of “federal lawsuits against ICE through 2020” is provided in these sources [2] [1]. Producing an authoritative count would require cross‑referencing PACER docket searches for ICE as defendant, consolidating entries from comprehensive legal trackers like the Justice Action Center Litigation Tracker, and standardizing inclusion rules (e.g., whether to include FOIA, FTCA, Bivens, and DHS co‑defendant suits)—tasks beyond the scope of the supplied reporting [1] [3] [6].