AP reporters Martha Bellisle, Claire Rush and Kate Brumback teamed up to provide a rare and comprehensive account of large-scale immigration arrests taking place at courthouses across the country.
Belisle in Seattle and Brumback in Atlanta had each spent weeks attending immigration court hearings, looking for patterns and untold stories. What they uncovered was startling: immigrants were being arrested immediately after the government dismissed their deportation cases—effectively luring them into court only to detain them upon exit.
While large-scale courthouse arrests had been reported previously, the team worked together to explain the legal mechanics behind the surge. Using court records, legal documents and first-person interviews, they illustrated how the government was using President Donald Trump’s expansion of fast-track deportation authority in a way that few outside immigration circles fully understood.
Their reporting made a complicated legal process clear and urgent, grounding it in the real experiences of people detained under the policy shift.
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