A federal appeals court on Friday endorsed the Trump administration’s policy of holding broad groups of immigration detainees without access to bond hearings, a major legal victory for President Trump and his deportation crackdown.
In a 2-1 decision, a panel of federal judges at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said the Trump administration had properly reinterpreted an immigration law last year to disqualify many unauthorized immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement from being able to ask an immigration judge to be released on bond.
Previously, immigrants who had lived in the U.S. unlawfully for years were generally eligible for bond hearings, and the opportunity to persuade an immigration judge that they were not flight risks and should be allowed to fight their deportation outside of a detention center. Mandatory detention had been historically limited to recent border crossers and those convicted of certain crimes.
But the Trump administration took the position that anyone who entered the U.S. illegally, irrespective of how long ago, is subject to mandatory detention during their deportation proceedings. The only mechanism for release under that policy was if ICE decided to parole them out of custody on humanitarian or public interest grounds.
The seismic policy change has led ICE to indefinitely hold detainees who entered the U.S. illegally years or even decades ago and who previously would’ve been eligible for bond, including those without criminal records.
The mass detention policy has been challenged in federal courts across the country, straining the resources of government lawyers. Most judges have found the policy to be illegal.
But the 5th Circuit panel disagreed and upheld the Trump administration’s legal position, reversing two lower court orders.
The majority opinion — penned by Reagan-nominated Judge Edith Jones and backed by Trump-nominated Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan — sided with the Trump administration’s view that federal law provides for mandatory detention of large numbers of unauthorized immigrants who were apprehended in the interior of the U.S. and deemed “applicants for admission.”
“The text says what it says, regardless of the decisions of prior Administrations,” the opinion read. “…In any event, that prior Administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority…does not mean they lacked the authority to do more.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated the ruling, calling it a “significant blow against activist judges who have been undermining our efforts to make America safe again at every turn.”
Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden nominee, dissented from the majority opinion. She wrote that the government’s claim that the law calls for mandatory detention ignored “historical precedent” and “wave[d] away” the fact that prior administrations hadn’t sought to detain people without bond en masse.
“And for what?” writes Douglas, arguing that the majority opinion was “based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained — some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.”
