Under the new policy, every undocumented immigrant is treated as someone “seeking” to enter the U.S., even if they have lived here for years, have families, hold jobs, and are in the process of seeking citizenship. Previous administrations have never applied this rule to immigrants already in the United States. The result was an unprecedented surge on the legal system, as judges scrambled to hear thousands of detainees’ cases before ICE could whisk them away to other states. Judge Fred Biery in the Western District of Texas told Politico that his courthouse typically sees 1,500 lawsuits every year—but as of May, they’d already hit 4,000 cases. “We’ve never seen anything like this in my career,” he told Politico.