Supreme Court agrees to hear challenge to Trump's bond policy for detained immigrants

Lower courts have overwhelmingly rejected the administration’s interpretation

The dispute centers on the administration’s reinterpretation last year of a longstanding immigration statute — a change that has led to a huge surge in the number of migrants held in detention centers. For years, undocumented immigrants living in the US could be released back into their communities on bond while awaiting deportation proceedings, provided they were not considered a threat to safety or a flight risk. Administration officials reversed that practice, reading the statute to require detention for any migrant who entered the country illegally, regardless of how long they had lived in the United States.

Judges who have rejected the administration’s interpretation have largely agreed that the statute applies only to migrants apprehended at a port of entry — such as the US-Mexico border — and not to those already living in the United States.

The plaintiff, Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, is a Brazilian citizen who has lived in the US for more than 20 years, according to authorities. He entered the country illegally in or around 2005, owns a home in Massachusetts, runs a small construction company, has a wife and two US-born children, and has never been charged with a crime. ICE agents arrested him last year while he was driving to work, and he was transferred to an immigration detention facility in Buffalo, New York. His request for a bond hearing was denied.

A federal district court sided with Barbosa da Cunha and ordered the government to provide a bond hearing. An appeals court affirmed that ruling when the administration challenged it. Lawyers for the government are now asking the Supreme Court to intervene.

The disagreement extends well beyond Barbosa da Cunha’s case. More than 500 district court judges and nine of the eleven federal appeals courts to consider similar challenges have rejected the administration’s interpretation, according to the New York Times, as cited by The Guardian.

The Guardian reported that the justices’ decision to hear the case makes it the latest Trump-era immigration policy to be added to the high court’s docket this term. Earlier in the week, the court also agreed to hear arguments in a separate case challenging the administration’s “third-country” deportation policy, which allows immigrants to be removed to a country other than their own.