Lawfare Daily: Katherine Pompilio on Tracking Government Non-Compliance in Habeas Corpus Cases

In this episode of The Lawfare Podcast, Molly Roberts interviews Catherine Pompilio, Associate Editor at Lawfare, about a groundbreaking project tracking government non-compliance in habeas corpus cases within U.S. immigration proceedings. The project, born from a list of 60–70 noncompliance cases in Minnesota and later expanded after a New Jersey judge ordered the Justice Department to disclose its own violations, has grown into a nationwide tracker of over 360 documented instances where federal agencies failed to follow court orders. Using AI (Anthropic Claude) to scrape court dockets and flag potential violations, the team then manually verified each case to ensure accuracy, filtering out false positives. The violations range from failure to file responses and deporting individuals against court orders to failing to return property and moving detainees across state lines without authorization. Despite judges repeatedly threatening civil contempt, the government often complies only after pressure, with no meaningful consequences for repeated failures. The episode underscores how isolated administrative errors, when aggregated, reveal a systemic pattern of noncompliance that undermines judicial authority and inflicts real harm on detainees—many of whom are released without essential items like coats, IDs, or work permits, and in some cases, while suffering life-threatening injuries. Pompilio argues that the federal judiciary must take responsibility for tracking these violations systematically, as the absence of a centralized, public database prevents judges from seeing the broader picture. Without such visibility, noncompliance appears as isolated mistakes rather than a coordinated failure. The episode concludes with a call for judges to follow through on their threats of sanctions, increase accountability, and recognize that the cumulative weight of these violations signals a deeper institutional breakdown. While criminal contempt remains a controversial option, the emphasis is on enforcing existing tools more consistently. The project not only exposes a troubling trend but also highlights the human cost behind bureaucratic failures—individuals denied freedom, dignity, and basic necessities due to systemic neglect.