A legal battle over the government's sweeping immigration detention practices reached the nation's highest court Friday, when the Trump administration formally petitioned the Supreme Court to authorize holding arrested migrants indefinitely — without bond hearings — regardless of how long they may have lived in the United States.
At the center of the dispute is a reinterpretation of a 1996 immigration statute that the administration began applying last year to justify mandatory detention not only for people intercepted at the border but also for non-citizens already established inside the country. The Department of Homeland Security took the position that such individuals qualify as "applicants for admission," a classification that under federal law strips them of eligibility for bond proceedings while their immigration cases move forward.
That reading was formally codified in September, when the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals issued a ruling embracing the new standard — prompting immigration judges nationwide to begin ordering mandatory detention on that basis.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the Supreme Court petition earlier in the week, before Thursday's pair of significant immigration victories for the administration, which included the court's authorization to revoke deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
"Detaining aliens who are living in the country after an illegal entry while their removal proceedings unfold prevents those aliens from evading hearings and helps ensure their removal from the United States," Sauer argued in the petition.
The administration is seeking to reverse a May ruling from a 2-1 panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Cincinnati, which found that officials had misread the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and violated the Fifth Amendment due process rights of migrants denied bond hearings. That case arose from Michigan and involved nationals of Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Guatemala — individuals who had spent years in the country before being apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.
The Sixth Circuit is one of three federal appeals courts to have struck down the detention practice, joining a broad coalition of lower-court judges who have similarly rejected it. Two other appellate courts, however, have sided with the administration — a circuit split that Sauer cited in urging the justices to step in and settle what he called a "critically important question of immigration law" driving thousands of individual detention challenges across the country.
Informational content only, not legal advice. Consult a licensed immigration attorney.