By Nate Raymond
June 26 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let it detain people arrested in its immigration crackdown without a chance to seek bond, even if they have lived in the country for years.
The administration made that request in a filing made public on Friday, asking the Supreme Court to overturn a May decision by a federal appeals court, which had rejected its reinterpretation of a decades-old immigration law that now underlies its mass detention policy.
The administration filed the appeal earlier this week, before the 6-3 conservative majority court handed it a pair of major wins on immigration policy on Thursday, including by allowing it to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of protections against deportation.
The administration is asking the Supreme Court to review a ruling by a 2-1 panel of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of three appeals courts that have joined with hundreds of lower-court judges in rejecting its detention practice.
Two other appeals courts have endorsed the administration’s policy, a fact U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer noted as he urged the justices to intervene and resolve a “critically important question of immigration law” that is fueling thousands of lawsuits by people challenging their detention.
“Detaining aliens who are living in the country after an illegal entry while their removal proceedings unfold prevents those aliens from evading hearings and helps ensure their removal from the United States,” Sauer argued in a petition.
Bucking a long-standing interpretation of immigration law, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last year took the position that non-citizens already residing in the United States, and not just people arriving at the border, qualify as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention.
Under federal immigration law, “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, which is part of the Justice Department, issued a decision in September that adopted that interpretation. As a result, immigration judges, who are employed by the department, across the country began ordering mandatory detention.
The 6th Circuit’s ruling came in cases out of Michigan involving citizens of Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Guatemala who had resided in the United States for years before being arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
It held that the administration misinterpreted a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and that the migrants were denied bond hearings in violation of their due process rights under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Sanjeev Miglani)
