Although federal judges have concluded more than 13,000 times in recent months that ICE has illegally detained people without the chance for release, those rulings often only tell half the story.

That’s because even when ICE detainees succeed in federal court, their subsequent bond hearings, where their freedom or continued detention is on the line, are run by Trump administration-controlled immigration judges. And those so-called IJs are under increasing pressure from the administration to deny bond in the vast majority of cases.

The result has been a flood of new federal court litigation from ICE detainees who say their bond hearings were fundamentally broken, a failure of due process that compounds their illegal detention in the first place.

Federal judges — who by law have no power to second-guess the discretionary decisions of Justice Department-run immigration courts — are often simply sidestepping them, ordering the immediate release of people from ICE detention rather than subject them to bond hearings they view as preordained.

Increasingly, federal judges are also dissecting immigration court hearings for constitutional infirmities, finding that IJs applied unconstitutional standards, ignored evidence that undercut their conclusions, failed to consider alternativesto detention or made illogical leaps to justify detention without explanation.

Though they may not have the power to review an immigration court’s factual conclusions, federal judges say, they can decide whether a hearing was “fundamentally unfair,” particularly if they were the ones who ordered the bond hearing to occur in the first place. Those reviews can result in an order for a new bond hearing or outright release.

Immigration court bond hearings, like detention hearings in criminal cases, require judges to consider whether a detainee is a “danger to the community” or is likely to flee rather than attend future proceedings. But unlike in criminal cases — in which the government must persuade courts to detain defendants pretrial — the legal standards for detaining ICE’s targets vary widely across the country. Some federal judges are taking the matter into their own hands, ordering immigration courts to apply the burden of proof to ICE rather than detainees.

As part of that process, federal judges are demanding audio recordings of bond hearings, delving into the nuances of immigration court precedents and focusing squarely on whether IJs heeded their orders to place the burden of proof on the government.

It’s a dicey dance, and one that has split courts more evenly than the lopsided rebuke of the Trump administration’s mass detention policies. But it’s one that has occurred with more frequency as the Trump administration has squeezed the ability of IJs to order release from detention.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees immigration courts and judges, renewed attacks on “rogue [federal] judges” and said the office wouldn’t respond to “baseless ad hominem attacks” on IJs. The Department of Homeland Security, whose attorneys present detention cases to immigration judges, did not answer an inquiry about the rise in federal judges’ rejections, instead sending a boilerplate comment about the availability of lawyers for ICE detainees.

But judges have begun rejecting the legitimacy of IJ bond hearings apace.

U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton, a New Jersey-based appointee of George W. Bush, recently upbraided an IJfor refusing to consider evidence submitted by an ICE detainee “too late,” even though it arrived on the correct date — just after the IJ had gone home for the day.

“This Court is well-aware of the amount of immigration petitions that have been filed in this District,” Wigenton wrote, “but this does not justify failing to review submitted documents … Accordingly, this Court will order a new bond hearing before a different immigration judge to avoid the appearance of bias.”

U.S. District Judge Kyle Dudek, a Trump appointee in Florida, was flabbergasted when an immigration judge refused to hold a bond hearing he had ordered for an ICE detainee — and administration lawyers simply acquiesced. When confronted over the episode, the administration asked for a do-over, saying the acquiescence was a mistake.

“It is a masterclass in litigation cynicism,” Dudek wrote. “A federal court is not a testing lab where the Executive branch can pilot a concession to get a case closed, stand by silently while its own administrative process flouts the resulting mandate, and then stroll back in demanding a clean slate. Give me a break.”

Dudek ordered the detainee released “because the Government has shown that it cannot follow this Court’s explicit directions and offers zero assurance that it will comply with the statutory process it previously championed.”

Judges are more vocally expressing their concerns about the fairness of court-ordered IJ bond hearings writ large. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, a Clinton appointee based in Virginia, recently wrote that “the Immigration Court may have become more politicized under this administration.” Judges keep emphasizing that the immigration judges are not actually members of the judiciary but instead are Executive Branch officials who must follow court orders and consider evidence presented by detainees.

In one recent decision, U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett, a George W. Bush appointee based in Ohio, found a bond hearing that resulted in a “flight risk” determination to be “woefully short of constitutional adequacy.” In another, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, an Obama appointee in Massachusetts, noted recently he had overturned four recent rulings by the same immigration judge over constitutional deficiencies.

Despite the uptick in judges’ rejections of the legitimacy of IJ bond hearings, the courts remain sharply split about how much power they have to intervene. Federal law “does not permit this Court to conduct what amounts to appellate review of the Immigration Judge’s discretionary decision,” one judge recently wrote, echoing similar concessions from other jurists. The right course,they say, is to appeal the IJ order to the “Board of Immigration Appeals,” another Executive Branch-run administrative agency.

U.S. District Judge James Simmons, a Biden appointee based in California, ordered a new bond hearing for a Chinese man who was labeled a “danger to the community” because he had driven onto the Camp Pendleton military base without authorization. The man claimed his trespass was inadvertent and the IJ denied bond despite acknowledging that the episode “could be simply a missed turn.”

U.S. District Judge Lauren King, a Washington state-based Biden appointee, was flummoxed by an IJ’s decision to label as a flight risk a man who “has lived in the country for 20 years, has owned a home for nine years, has worked the same job for many years, and has four children, including two minor dependents who are U.S. citizens.” The IJ’s decision was based on the man’s 25-year-old decision to enter the country illegally, King said.

“Such rationale,” King concluded, “also suggests that any individual who entered the country illegally could be considered a flight risk and denied bond on that ground — but this would effectively transform discretionary detention into de facto mandatory detention.”