4 Missouri & Kansas immigrants held in KC for months without bond, lawsuit says
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- A Kansas City law firm filed a federal lawsuit to grant detainees bond hearings.
- The filing says DHS began classifying noncitizens as applicants for admission in 2025.
- The lawsuit seeks a writ of mandamus and a restraining order to require bond hearings.
A lawsuit is accusing federal authorities of unlawfully detaining dozens of people, a shift that defense attorneys say forces those being held to challenge their confinement case by case in court.
The lawsuit, filed March 17 in the U.S. District Court in Kansas City, seeks a temporary restraining order blocking the practice of holding individuals without granting them bond hearings.
The legal action centers on a policy change implemented about a year ago that altered how immigration courts handle bond eligibility, Rekha Sharma-Crawford, a Kansas City attorney, said.
“It started in July of last year, when they started this policy of classifying people who have historically been eligible for bond into a category that doesn’t allow them to have one,” Sharma-Crawford said. “It’s creating a policy against somebody who’s a noncitizen to say they’re not eligible for bond. I mean, it’s a farce, right? And we can’t imagine that in any real court of law.”
The complaint argues that since 1996, many noncitizens living in the U.S. were eligible for release on bond. That changed in 2025, when the Department of Homeland Security began classifying them as “applicants for admission,” subjecting them to mandatory detention.
The filing claims that other petitions challenging the detention policy in the district have been filed and received favorable rulings, ordering the government to grant bond hearings to those detained.
“However, defendants continue to apply the same detention policy to other detainees and deny them bond hearings unless and until each detainee files a new habeas petition and obtains an individual federal court order,” the complaint reads. “Extraordinary situations sometimes require extraordinary remedies, this is one of those times.”
The lawsuit seeks to require bond hearings without the need for individual petitions.
‘Whiplash in the judicial system’
The lawsuit lists The Asylum Clinic Kansas City and four individuals who are detained in Kansas and Missouri as the plaintiffs.
Those four individuals have been in custody for months, with the longest detention starting in November.
The complaint claims that The Asylum Clinic Kansas City has been forced to divert resources from its normal legal services to address the surge in detention cases, including delaying or declining representation in at least 20 non-detention cases since September.
Some of those cases involve domestic abuse survivors and unaccompanied minors, the complaint said.
“Despite over 300 successful cases nationwide, only a fraction of people suffering constitutional violations have received relief,” the complaint said. “The record number of detentions appears to be a part of the overall plans to increase and speed up deportations.”
Sharma-Crawford said that there are now three different class action lawsuits in district courts across the country seeking to challenge the same detention policy.
A Justice Department attorney representing the government did not respond to a request for comment.
Eighth Circuit ruling
Sharma-Crawford said they had to take a different path than originally planned following a ruling in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that upheld the detention policy.
The law firm had filed for a temporary restraining order, but on the same day that a conference was scheduled to discuss the case, the Eighth Circuit ruling came down.
The ruling upheld the new detention policy, complicating the lawsuit and prompting the government to seek dismissal.
“So of course, that changes a little bit the court review of it,” Sharma-Crawford said. “So the TRO remains undecided by the court as of now. In the meantime, the government filed a motion to dismiss, basically saying, ‘Look, you know, the Eighth Circuit has made a ruling, and the court should dismiss the complaint altogether.’”
The lawsuit seeks a writ of mandamus to be issued in the case, essentially an order that would require the immigration court to perform bond hearings.
“It is therefore no longer about interpreting the law; it is about federal officers like immigration judges, having a duty to administer the statute in accordance with the law once courts have determined the interpretation is unlawful,” the complaint reads. “It is also about stopping the constant and unsustainable disregard of the laws by the government which has caused whiplash in the judicial system, and for noncitizens and their families.”
The case is currently awaiting the ruling on the temporary restraining order, as well as the motion to dismiss, before moving forward.
“These are long established issues, and the administration has very much taken the attitude that you know precedent doesn’t mean anything,” Sharma-Crawford said. “We’ve seen that, not only in the immigration context, but other areas of the law as well.”
