New habeas petitions in Texas federal courts slipped 1.8 percent in June

Detained immigrants filed 1,399 new habeas corpus petitions in the federal courts of the Western and Southern Districts of Texas in June, 1.8 percent fewer than the 1,424 they filed in May, according to case records compiled by Habeas Dockets, a project of the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative that tracks these cases because Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2(c) blocks remote electronic access to their documents. A habeas corpus petition asks a judge to decide whether the government may lawfully keep a person in custody, and filing one does not mean the person was released, just as the closing of a case does not mean the person was deported. The two districts moved in opposite directions. 827 petitions reached the Western District, whose divisions include El Paso and San Antonio, down 4.1 percent from 862 in May. 572 petitions reached the Southern District, whose divisions include Houston and Laredo, up 1.8 percent from 562. Weekly volume stayed inside a narrow band across the two months: complete calendar weeks brought the two courts between 261 combined petitions, in the week of June 15, and 354, in the week of May 18.

The flat stretch follows two quarters of growth without recorded precedent. 3,448 habeas suits arrived in the Western District from October 2025 through March 2026, the most of any federal judicial district in the country, and 2,305 arrived in the Southern District, the third most, according to a May 11 report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC counted 9,059 habeas filings nationwide in March 2026 against 105 in March 2025 and attributes the rise to the administration's expanded detention and deportation operations. The Texas Tribune and El Paso Matters reported in February that the wave had already pushed filings in these courts past any earlier year on record. The May and June numbers show that the wave stopped climbing and settled at a level several times higher than last autumn's. 2,721 of the 2,823 petitions filed across the two districts in May and June, or 96.4 percent, remained open as of July 11, when the data was collected, and 102 had closed. The pool of decided cases is too small and too recent to support any statement about how judges are ruling on the new filings, so this analysis makes none. 14 rows in the Southern District carry transfer notations that can place one petitioner on two dockets, and 12 rows across both districts are clerk-labeled filing errors or malformed captions rather than substantive petitions.