The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to uphold a detention practice that would allow authorities to hold immigrants for years without a chance to seek bond, even if they have built lives in the United States.
The request, filed Friday through the Justice Department's solicitor general, targets a May ruling by a federal appeals court that rejected the administration's reinterpretation of a 1996 immigration law. That reinterpretation now forms the backbone of the administration's mass detention policy.
The filing came before the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority handed the administration two major immigration victories on Thursday, including approval to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of deportation protections.
The administration's core argument rests on a legal maneuver: redefining who counts as an "applicant for admission" under federal law. Historically, that term applied only to people at the border. The Department of Homeland Security changed course last year, arguing that non-citizens already living in the U.S. after entering illegally should also fall under that category.
That shift matters enormously. Under immigration law, "applicants for admission" face mandatory detention during their cases and cannot request bond hearings. By expanding the definition, DHS shifted thousands of cases toward detention without bail.
The Board of Immigration Appeals, housed within the Justice Department, formalized this interpretation in September. Immigration judges employed by the department immediately began ordering mandatory detention across the country.
One federal appeals court has already rejected the approach. The Sixth Circuit, based in Cincinnati, ruled in cases involving immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Guatemala who had lived in America for years before ICE or Border Patrol arrested them. The court found the administration misinterpreted the 1996 law and violated the Fifth Amendment rights of detainees denied bond hearings.
The administration's solicitor general, D John Sauer, argues the Supreme Court should resolve what he calls a "critically important question of immigration law" fracturing the lower courts. Two other appeals courts have endorsed the administration's detention practice, while three have rejected it, along with hundreds of individual judges. The disagreement has spawned thousands of lawsuits challenging detentions.
Sauer contended that holding people in detention while removal proceedings advance prevents them from skipping hearings and ensures they leave the country. The administration is banking on the conservative court's recent immigration victories to back this expansion of detention power.
Author James Rodriguez: "The administration is testing how far it can stretch a 30-year-old statute to lock people away without a hearing, and a conservative Court majority just gave it two wins in a row."
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