The legal citation looked authoritative.

It carried the name of a federal appeals court case, pointed to a specific page in an official reporter and supposedly supported the government’s argument that a detained immigrant had no right to seek relief from a federal judge.

There was only one problem.

The case did not exist.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Justice Department has been sharply rebuked by a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump after a government court filing cited what appeared to be fabricated legal authority—an error the judge said was likely generated by artificial intelligence.

Chief U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou of the Western District of Michigan declined to impose sanctions immediately. But her order delivered an unmistakable warning to the nation’s most powerful law-enforcement agency: future filings must not contain imaginary cases.

The controversy could hardly have arrived at a worse moment for Blanche.

Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney is currently awaiting Senate confirmation to become permanent attorney general. His nomination has already been battered by questions about the Justice Department’s independence, the departure of experienced prosecutors and the administration’s handling of politically sensitive investigations.

Now, a court filing submitted under his name has been linked to one of the legal profession’s fastest-growing embarrassments: generative AI inventing plausible-sounding judicial decisions that were never issued.

The dispute began with the detention of Izzeddin Daghra, who was being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

An immigration judge granted Daghra release on a $35,000 bond. But the federal government placed an automatic hold on the bond while appealing the decision, keeping him detained despite the immigration judge’s ruling.

Daghra then sought help from the federal courts.

In a May 2026 brief, the government argued that the district court lacked the authority to intervene. To support that position, Blanche’s team cited a supposed Sixth Circuit decision titled Taylor v. Hott.

Judge Jarbou attempted to locate it.

She could not.

“The cited case, Taylor v. Hott, is not located at the identified page of the Federal Appendix,” Jarbou wrote.

The page listed by the government contained an entirely different decision involving commercial arbitration. It had nothing to do with immigration detention, federal bond review or the legal principle attributed to the fictional case.

The judge searched beyond the incorrect page.

Still, there was no federal decision bearing that caption and no ruling containing the language quoted in the government’s filing.

The conclusion was deeply troubling.

“It seems this citation was likely produced by generative artificial intelligence,” Jarbou wrote.

Court records reportedly listed each government submission in the case—including the filing containing the nonexistent citation—as submitted “by Todd Blanche.”

That does not necessarily mean Blanche personally researched, drafted or inserted the fake authority. Senior Justice Department officials routinely appear as counsel of record on filings prepared by teams of government lawyers.

But the document was submitted in the name of the United States government, under the leadership of the acting attorney general.

That makes the mistake more than a technical embarrassment.

Legal citations are the foundation of courtroom argument. Judges rely on attorneys to accurately identify previous rulings, quote them fairly and explain how they apply to the dispute before the court.

When a lawyer cites a fabricated case, the court may waste hours attempting to verify something that never existed. Opposing counsel must investigate the false authority, and the judge may be misled about what the law actually requires.

In an immigration dispute, the consequences can be especially severe.

A person’s freedom may depend on the accuracy of the government’s arguments. Here, Daghra remained confined while the government challenged his release, meaning the legal filing was not an academic exercise—it concerned whether a real person could leave detention and return home.

Jarbou ultimately dismissed the case after the government’s 90-day automatic hold expired. Officials confirmed that Daghra could post the $35,000 bond and be released.

But the fabricated citation remained in the record.

The judge stopped short of punishing the government for now.

“Although the Court will not presently impose sanctions for this conduct,” she wrote, “it goes without saying that the Government must ensure its future filings with this Court do not include nonexistent case law.”

The phrase “not presently” left the threat of future penalties hanging over Blanche’s department.

The incident is part of a much broader crisis confronting courts across the country.

Since generative AI tools became widely available, judges have repeatedly encountered filings containing invented cases, false quotations and fabricated legal histories. More than 1,000 cases have reportedly involved flagged AI-generated citation problems since 2023.

The technology can produce confident, polished legal language in seconds. But it does not inherently know whether the cases it names are real. Unless a human attorney independently checks every citation, fiction can enter the official court record disguised as precedent.

Lawyers have already been fined, sanctioned and publicly humiliated for failing to perform that basic verification.

The Justice Department is supposed to meet an even higher standard.

It possesses enormous resources, thousands of trained attorneys and access to the nation’s leading legal databases. It also asks judges every day to trust its representations while making decisions involving imprisonment, deportation, national security and constitutional rights.

That trust is difficult to maintain when the government cites a phantom ruling.

For Blanche, the political damage could extend directly into his confirmation fight.

Senators evaluating his nomination are being asked to decide whether he has the judgment and competence to lead the Justice Department permanently.

Now they may also ask how a nonexistent case entered a federal filing carrying his name—and why no one inside the department caught it before a Trump-appointed judge did.

The government wanted the court to believe it lacked power to intervene.

Instead, the filing exposed something else entirely: a Justice Department argument supported by a case that existed only in the imagination of a machine.