Overview
- The 4th U.S. Court of Appeals, which ruled Thursday, held that two longtime residents detained by ICE must get bond hearings and that the agency’s July 8, 2025 guidance cannot be read to bar those hearings for people arrested in the U.S. interior.
- The majority opinion said the government’s reading would authorize mass detention without due process and pointed to the Geary Act and Japanese internment as historical warnings when rejecting the administration’s statutory interpretation.
- The court described a statutory clash between Section 235(b) — detention of applicants for admission — and Section 236 — bond eligibility for people already in the interior, and said courts should not infer such a sweeping change from vague language.
- The ruling is the ninth federal appeals-court loss for the administration on this issue while the 5th and 8th Circuits have upheld the policy, a split that has produced thousands of habeas petitions and uneven access to bond hearings for detainees nationwide.
- The Department of Homeland Security says it is confident in its position and has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the split, a step that will determine whether mandatory no-bond detention can be applied broadly or whether long-standing bond protections remain in place.