The US Department of Justice cited a fabricated court case in federal proceedings to oppose an immigration detainee’s bid for release from custody.
The case involved petitioner Izzeddin Ahmed Abdulghaffar Daghra, who was detained by ICE and held in a county jail after his arrest.
An immigration judge had set a $35,000 bond for Daghra, but the Trump administration refused to honour it and instead filed an appeal.
Under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.19(i), that appeal triggered an automatic 90-day stay of the bond determination, keeping Daghra behind bars.
Daghra argued that allowing the government to override a judicially granted bond simply by registering its disagreement constituted a violation of his due process rights.
In opposing his release, the US Attorney’s Office cited Taylor v. Hott, 724 F. App’x 387, 392 (6th Cir. 2018), a case purportedly standing for the principle that district courts cannot second-guess an immigration judge’s bond determination.
Chief Judge Jarbou investigated the citation and found that page 387 of volume 724 of the Federal Appendix belongs to an entirely different case.
As the judge noted, “The cited case, Taylor v. Hott, is not located at the identified page of the Federal Appendix,” with that page instead falling within Atkins v. CGI Techs. & Sols., Inc., 724 F. App’x 383 (6th Cir. 2018), a commercial arbitration dispute.
The judge further confirmed she could find no Sixth Circuit opinion carrying the Taylor v. Hott caption, nor any federal case anywhere containing the quoted language attributed to it.
The episode comes more than three years into widespread public awareness of artificial intelligence tools that generate plausible but entirely fictitious legal citations, a phenomenon that has already produced a substantial body of disciplinary caselaw.
The DOJ is not a solo practitioner making an occasional courtroom appearance but one of the most powerful and well-resourced legal institutions in the world, with decisions that carry direct consequences for individuals’ liberty.
Judge Jarbou, a Trump appointee with Federalist Society ties who previously dismissed a DOJ lawsuit demanding Michigan’s full voter file including personal data, did not let the false citation pass without comment.
Despite her detailed criticism of the fabricated reference, which consumed roughly two-thirds of her order, Jarbou declined to impose any sanctions or hold any individual attorney accountable.
Critics have noted that a Department of Justice that has repeatedly faced accusations of misrepresenting facts to courts, and has in some cases been instructed to take a confrontational posture toward judicial oversight, may have exhausted the goodwill that makes such lenient treatment possible.
The central concern raised by the episode goes beyond partisanship: when law enforcement lawyers cite invented precedent to keep a person detained, the professional and institutional consequences should reflect the severity of that reality.