Appeals court endorses Trump policy of holding many ICE detainees without bond hearings
A federal appeals court on Friday approved the Trump administration’s policy of holding large groups of detained migrants without access to bond hearings, a major legal victory for President Trump and his crackdown on deportations.
In a 2-1 decision, a panel of federal judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said the Trump administration correctly reinterpreted an immigration law last year to prevent many illegal immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement from being able to ask an immigration judge for bail.
Previously, immigrants who had lived in the United States illegally for years were generally entitled to bond hearings and the chance to persuade an immigration judge that they were not a flight risk and should be allowed to fight their deportation outside of a detention center. Mandatory detention has historically been limited to recent border crossers and those convicted of certain crimes.
But the Trump administration has taken the position that anyone who enters the United States illegally, no matter how early, is subject to mandatory detention during their deportation proceedings. The only mechanism for release under this policy was if ICE decided to release them on parole for humanitarian or public interest reasons.
This seismic policy shift has led ICE to indefinitely detain detainees who entered the United States illegally years or even decades ago and who previously would have been eligible for bail, including those without criminal records.
The policy of mass detention was challenged in federal courts across the country, strain resources government lawyers. Most judges found the policy illegal.
But the 5th Circuit panel disagreed and upheld the Trump administration’s legal position, overturning two lower court orders.
The majority opinion — written by Reagan-appointed Justice Edith Jones and supported by Trump-appointed Justice Stuart Kyle Duncan — sided with the Trump administration’s view that federal law provides for mandatory detention of large numbers of illegal immigrants who have been apprehended inside the United States and considered “candidates for admission.”
“The text says what it says, regardless of the decisions of previous administrations,” the opinion reads. “… Regardless, the fact that previous administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority… does not mean they did not have the authority to do more.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi welcomed the ruling, calling it “a major blow to activist judges who are undermining our efforts to make America safe again at every turn.”
Justice Dana Douglas, Biden’s nominee, disagreed with the majority opinion. She wrote that the government’s assertion that the law calls for mandatory detention ignores “historical precedent” and “the wave[d] “the fact that previous administrations had not sought to detain people en masse without bail.
“And for what?” writes Douglas, arguing that the majority opinion was “based on little more than an apparent belief that Congress must have intended these noncitizens to be detained—some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.”
