Trump administration asks supreme court to back immigration detention policy | US immigration
The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to allow it to detain people arrested during an immigration crackdown without the chance to seek bail, even if they have been living in the country for years.
The administration made the request in a filing made public Friday, asking the court to overturn a May decision by a federal appeals court that refused to reinterpret decades-old immigration law that now underpins mass detention policy.
The administration filed an appeal earlier this week before a 6-3 conservative majority court handed down a pair of major wins on immigration policy on Thursday, including allowing the removal of protections from deportation for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants. The administration is asking the high court to review the ruling by a 2-1 panel of the sixth U.S. appeals court based in Cincinnati, one of three appeals courts that joined hundreds of lower court judges who rejected the holdout.
Two other appeals courts also upheld the administration’s policy; U.S. attorney general D John Sauer underlined that fact as he called on the justices to intervene and resolve “a critically important question of immigration law” that has fueled thousands of lawsuits challenging people’s detention.
“Detaining aliens living in the country after illegal entry while deportation proceedings are pending prevents these aliens from evading hearings and helps ensure their deportation from the United States,” Sauer said in a petition.
Challenging its long-standing interpretation of immigration law, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last year adopted the view that not only those arriving at the border but also noncitizens currently residing in the U.S. qualify as “admission applicants” subject to mandatory detention.
Under federal immigration law, those “applicants for admission” to the United States are subject to mandatory detention while their cases proceed in immigration courts and are ineligible for bond hearings.
The Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the justice department, issued a decision adopting that interpretation in September. As a result, immigration judges employed by the department across the country began issuing mandatory detention orders. The sixth circuit ruling came in cases out of Michigan involving citizens of Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Guatemala who resided in the United States for years before being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP), both agencies within DHS.
The court ruled that the administration misinterpreted a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and denied immigrants access to hearings in a way that violated their due process rights under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
