Durbin, Padilla Urge DHS, DOJ To End Blanket $1.8 Million Fines Being Improperly Assessed On Law-Abiding Immigrants

CHICAGO – U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration, today sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin urging them to end the improper application of certain civil penalties in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to law-abiding immigrants.

In an attempt to intimidate and frighten law-abiding immigrants, the Trump Administration is fining them up to $1.8 million, without any individual explanation for why fines have been assessed. These immigrants include individuals with legal authorization to be in the United States, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, individuals seeking a green card, and survivors of domestic violence or trafficking with pending applications for immigration status. The INA authorizes civil monetary penalties for certain violations of immigration law. The penalties have rarely been applied—since the introduction of civil penalties in 1996, only President Trump has ever sought to impose civil penalties on noncitizens under these provisions.

The Senators wrote, “In assessing these fines, your Departments appear to have abandoned critical safeguards that have long prevented law-abiding immigrants from being improperly targeted with unreasonable penalties… last year President Trump issued a series of executive orders implementing his mass deportation campaign, through which he directed federal agencies to use these civil penalties to achieve ‘the garnishment of wages [] and the confiscation of savings and personal property, including homes and vehicles.’ The Trump Administration began quietly changing federal policies to eliminate procedural safeguards that might have prevented the wrongful application of these penalties.”

DHS made a form change that allowed for penalty issuance without any individualized explanation for the basis for a fine. DHS and the Department of Justice issued an interim final rule (IFR)—a regulatory mechanism that bypasses standard notice and comment procedures—which codifies many of these changes and also permits the issuance of penalties based solely on a finding that an individual has a final order of removal or has agreed to voluntary departure.

The Senators continued, “These changes raise serious legal concerns. They were made without advance notice to the public, leaving many noncitizens who had been complying with the law unsure of the basis under which these fees could be assessed and unsure of how to challenge them. An individualized determination is necessary to provide adequate notice of the basis for a violation and a meaningful way to challenge the penalties. In addition, the mere existence of a removal order or voluntary departure agreement in a noncitizen’s record is not sufficient to establish willful or voluntary failure to comply with departure obligations, as is required under the statute… Without case specific analysis, your Departments cannot properly determine whether assessing penalties for failure to comply with departure obligations is appropriate under the law.”

The Senators continued, “The Administration has stated it changed policies to allow the imposition of civil monetary penalties ‘swiftly and at [] scale’ in order to ‘achieve the Administration’s immigration enforcement and border security objectives.’ As of May, the federal government had issued more than 65,000 fines to immigrants who reportedly have removal orders but who remain in the U.S., seeking more than $36 billion in total. However, as with the rest of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation policies, this policy does not appear intended to target the ‘worst of the worst,’ but rather to coerce law-abiding immigrants to leave the United States.”

In the letter, the Senators request responses to a number of questions no later than July 31, 2026.

The full text of the letter can be found here.

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