A federal appeals court on Wednesday struck down the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy for immigrants in federal custody, ruling 2-1 that people arrested inside the country cannot be denied bond hearings. The decision from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals covers detainees in Georgia, Alabama and Florida.
For Joshua McCall, who has been fighting the policy, the ruling was immediate relief. “This is huge,” he said, adding that the government “can’t do mass deportation without this policy.” The court said the Department of Homeland Security can no longer deny bond hearings to people in immigration detention in the three-state region.
The ruling cuts against a sweeping no-bond policy the Trump administration rolled out last year. For decades, immigrants without legal status who were arrested inside the United States had been able to seek bond hearings while their immigration cases were pending. Under the newer policy, immigrants seeking bond hearings had recently been forced to individually sue in district court and file habeas corpus petitions claiming illegal detention.
As of early April, there were more than 60,300 immigrants in ICE custody, a 50% increase since the end of the Biden administration. Georgia alone had roughly 4,400 ICE detainees, the fifth-largest ICE detainee population in the country, making the 11th Circuit’s ruling especially significant there. The court said only recent immigrants apprehended at the border or a point of entry can be categorically denied bond, while those arrested in the interior are entitled to hearings.
The panel’s reasoning also echoed an earlier appellate decision in New York City, but it collided with rulings from appellate panels in New Orleans and St. Louis that upheld the no-bond policy. That split makes a Supreme Court review more likely, and it leaves the administration with a narrower path to keep the policy in place outside the 11th Circuit.
In its opinion, the court said, “Simply put, the language that Congress has chosen to use does not grant to the Executive unfettered authority to detain, without the possibility of bond, every unadmitted alien present in the country,” and added that “Nowhere in the text, structure, or history of the Immigration and Nationality Act does that reading find steady footing.”
