Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Migrant Detentions Without Bond

The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow people arrested during immigration raids to be detained without the right to release on bond, Reuters reports. The administration is asking the court to overturn a federal appeals court ruling that had earlier found the practice of mass detention unlawful.

The administration’s position is that people in the United States after entering the country illegally should be held in custody while their cases are being considered in immigration courts. The authorities argue that this is necessary to prevent them from evading court proceedings and to ensure that they are removed from the country.

The petition to the Supreme Court says that detaining foreigners living in the country after illegal entry while their removal proceedings are underway prevents them from avoiding hearings and helps ensure their removal from the United States.

The dispute centers on the interpretation of the 1996 law on illegal-immigration reform. The administration earlier said that mandatory detention without the right to bond while cases are pending should apply not only to people detained at the border, but also to those who have long lived in the country without legal status. That interpretation was supported by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, after which immigration judges began issuing mass rulings requiring the detention of such migrants.

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, however, disagreed. It considered cases from Michigan involving citizens of Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Guatemala who had lived in the United States for many years before being arrested by ICE. The court concluded that the administration had misinterpreted the 1996 law and that such people had been unlawfully denied the right to a bond hearing. In the court’s view, this also violated their right to due process, guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The administration is now asking the Supreme Court to review that ruling and allow it to apply the current practice of detention without bond at the federal level.

The court filing comes amid Trump’s own statements about the scale of his immigration policy. On his TruthSocial page, the president wrote that the total number of arrests and deportations of illegal migrants over the past 12 months exceeds the comparable figures of any other president in the country’s history. According to him, the administration has the highest average daily level of arrests carried out by ICE and CBP, including the total number of detentions with final deportation orders, although those orders themselves, as he acknowledged, are being seriously delayed by the courts. Trump added that this fully refutes claims that deportation figures under Obama were comparable to today’s.