The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has led to a 12,000 percent increase in the number of lawsuits filed in federal court in Massachusetts by immigrants alleging they were being illegally detained, US Attorney Leah B. Foley said Thursday.
There were about 850 habeas corpus petitions filed since President Trump took office in January 2025 by people who were arrested and detained by federal immigration agents, compared with only seven in all of 2024, Foley said during a media roundtable at her office in the federal courthouse in Boston.
There were 208 cases filed last month, according to a Globe review of court filings.
Foley said that more than 100 of the recent habeas petitions filed in Massachusetts resulted from the recent immigration sweep in Maine.
“There was a surge in Maine and all of those cases ended up coming here,” said Foley.
Foley, a Republican and career prosecutor tapped by President Trump to lead the office a year ago, defended the immigration enforcement and accused Massachusetts state and local officials of “making it appear that this is just an assault on immigration.”
“It is not,” Foley said. “It is about enforcing the laws of our country.”
The Department of Homeland Security said the Maine surge in January was “targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens who have terrorized communities.”
But the operation led to protests, and Maine officials denounced the enforcement tactics, saying the arrests appeared to be indiscriminate, sweeping up immigrants with no criminal histories.
In Massachusetts, there’s been a coordinated effort by lawyers to immediately file habeas petitions on behalf of immigrants who allege they have been locked up without due process.
Immigration lawyers have accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement of moving immigrants across the country to disrupt or delay efforts to challenge their arrests and removal from the United States, and to place them under the jurisdiction of more conservative federal courts.
The federal judiciary in Massachusetts has provided some relief by consistently ordering the government not to move the petitioners out of state while their cases are pending.
In Minnesota, a federal prosecutor was fired recently after complaining about the strain of handling a spike in cases, the New York Times reported last week.
Foley said the habeas cases in Massachusetts were primarily handled by six federal prosecutors, and it was not placing any strain on her office because the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department have loaned attorneys to her office to help handle the high volume.
“We believe that a lot of these matters need to be resolved in the immigration court,” Foley said.
She said her office has handled the spike in civil cases while also prosecuting more people for the crime of illegally reentering the country after being deported. She said her office brought nearly 140 criminal immigration cases in 2025, up from 22 cases the previous year.
At the same time, she said the US attorney’s office has seen a 40 percent reduction in support staff and a nearly 20 percent reduction in criminal prosecutors over the past few years.
“We had to do more with less,” Foley said.
During Thursday’s media event, Foley touted her office’s accomplishments during her 13 months at the helm, and spoke about her priorities and troubling criminal trends.
She said her office is “keeping our eye on new emerging threats,” including nihilistic, violent extremist groups such as the 764 network, which target minors and young adults through online platforms “using sextortion and coercion to promote violence, sadism, and chaos.”
Another focus, Foley said, is on prosecuting people who fraudulently collected benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
She said her office has named a “fraud coordinator” to oversee investigations that will lead to more charges involving SNAP, formerly called food stamps. That move comes as the Trump administration has threatened to withhold SNAP funding from Democratic-led states unless they provide information about recipients with the Department of Agriculture to help “root out fraud.”
Thursday’s session was dominated by questions about immigration enforcement, as Foley was pressed about complaints that masked and heavily armed ICE agents have violated the constitutional rights of people and instilled fear in communities.
“We have not received any evidence that unconstitutional targeting or arrests are being made in Massachusetts,” Foley said. “If they are, and the facts support those allegations, we will investigate it and prosecute it.”
Last month, a federal judge in Boston unsealed documents that showed Trump administration officials acknowledged they could not find any evidence that Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk was involved in antisemitic behavior or supported terrorist organizations, yet arrested her without warning in March and publicly branded her a national security threat. She was released after spending roughly six weeks in a detention facility, and deportation proceedings against her were recently terminated in immigration court.
Foley declined to comment on that case.
Foley was also peppered with questions about tension between her office, which defends ICE in court, and Democratic leaders in Massachusetts, where state law prohibits local police from assisting the government in civil immigration enforcement.
Governor Maura Healey put forward a bill last month that would ban federal immigration enforcement from entering churches, schools, courthouses, and other sensitive locations in Massachusetts.
And last week, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and leaders from Cambridge, Somerville, Lynn, Newton, and Chelsea — six of the largest cities in Greater Boston — issued orders that prohibit federal officials from using city property for immigration enforcement.
The officials also directed city employees to use de-escalation tactics to protect peaceful protesters.
The goal of the coordinated actions, Wu said, is to protect residents from “unconstitutional and violent federal operations.”
On Thursday, Foley said, “Federal officers follow federal law and they are not going to follow state law that is inapplicable to them.”
She added: “When it comes to their enforcement operations, they will take their counsel and advice from DHS.”
Shelley Murphy can be reached at shelley.murphy@globe.com. Follow her @shelleymurph.