Four people living in Georgia and North Carolina have filed a federal class-action lawsuit accusing the Department of Homeland Security of abruptly scrapping a decades-old policy that barred immigration agents from re-detaining previously released noncitizens without a specific reason. The suit says the shift has led to re-arrests at routine check-ins, upended households, and disrupted businesses across Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina since the change took hold around May 2025.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, names as plaintiffs Livinton Sosa Martinez, a 41-year-old Nicaraguan man living in Greensboro, North Carolina; Raquel Mariona Ebora, a 39-year-old Honduran woman living in Dunn, North Carolina; Alvaro Ibañez-Cardenas, a 35-year-old Venezuelan man living in Athens, Georgia; and Ambrosio Trujillo Zavaleta, a 46-year-old Mexican man living in Savannah, Georgia, according to the ACLU of Georgia. All four have pending applications for immigration relief and are seeking to represent a broader class of people harmed by the policy. They are suing DHS, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Acting ICE Director David Venturella, and Acting Atlanta Field Office Director Kristen Sullivan.
For more than four decades, the ICE Atlanta Field Office — which covers Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina — followed what's known as the Changed Circumstances Policy, which barred re-detention of previously released immigrants unless officials made an individualized finding that circumstances had materially changed. Under that rule, ICE did not seek to detain people who were complying with their release conditions while their immigration cases moved forward. The ACLU says DHS abruptly abandoned that approach around May 2025 and replaced it with a policy authorizing re-arrest and re-detention without any such determination.
Hundreds, Possibly Thousands, Affected Since May 2025
Since the reversal, the ACLU says, hundreds — if not thousands — of people have been re-detained across the Atlanta Field Office's three-state territory. The complaint alleges individuals were re-arrested without warning at routine ICE check-ins, with consequences that included separated families, disrupted businesses, and people cut off from essential medical care. It also alleges that ICE has detained some individuals in facilities far from their homes, making it harder for them to communicate with attorneys, gather evidence, or pursue their immigration claims.
The plaintiffs argue the policy change violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which allows courts to strike down agency actions adopted without reasoned explanation, without consideration of reliance interests, or without compliance with the Constitution and other laws. They also argue it runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment's protections against re-detention on the same immigration charges absent an individualized determination that circumstances have materially changed. People built their lives, the suit says, in reliance on the expectation that the Changed Circumstances Policy would remain in place.
Attorneys Say Clients Followed the Rules
Corina Scott said the plaintiffs did everything the government asked of them. Her clients complied with government rules, attended hearings and check-ins, and followed release conditions while building lives with the expectation they would remain free, she said. Scott added that DHS is systematically stripping people of longstanding protections and arbitrarily re-detaining them in harsh conditions.
Raneem Ashrawi said immigrant community members built their lives on the expectation that following DHS's conditions would protect them from re-detention. She said the administration has prioritized arrest quotas over individuals' families, livelihoods, and futures, and that ICE officers were instructed to disregard class members' unique stories and circumstances without any reasoned process or consideration. Sarah Schreiber said South Carolinians should not have to fear being baselessly taken from their communities and returned to detention, adding that the ACLU affiliates involved stand with their clients and the rule of law against what she called unjustifiable abuses.
The lawsuit was brought by ACLU-GA, ACLU-NC, ACLU-SC, and the law firm Foley Hoag LLP. The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the re-detention policy unlawful, block its continued use, restore the Changed Circumstances Policy, and temporarily halt the current policy while the case proceeds. The case is Sosa Martinez et al. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security et al.
A California Court Already Blocked a Similar Policy
The Georgia filing isn't the first legal test of this kind. In a separate case covering ICE's San Francisco area of responsibility, a federal district court temporarily halted a comparable re-detention policy, concluding that DHS had radically departed from longstanding practice without the legally required justification, according to ACLU of Northern California. In that case, Judge P. Casey Pitts found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that the policy violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and the court provisionally certified the case as a class action.
Under 8 U.S.C. § 1226, an immigrant may be arrested and detained on a warrant issued by the Attorney General while a decision on removal is pending, according to the U.S. Code. The statutory excerpt does not resolve whether the specific re-detention practice challenged in the Georgia case is lawful; that question is now before the Atlanta federal court.
The Georgia lawsuit lands amid a broader surge in immigration enforcement nationwide. ICE has detained more than 610,000 people since President Trump's inauguration, according to The Marshall Project, which also reported that more than 45,000 people were detained in a single recent month — the highest monthly total since Trump retook office — and that more than 270,000 people spent at least a week in detention last year, more than in any year since 2012. The Vera Institute of Justice has separately reported that detention populations reached unprecedented levels by mid-March 2026, exceeding the previous 2019 peak on nearly every day since mid-June 2025, and that ICE detained people in 469 facilities in July 2026 even though its own website acknowledged using just 208 of them.
