Another Appeals Court Backs Trump Administration’s Mass Detention Policy

A second federal appeals court has blessed the Trump administration’s policy of locking up the vast majority of people it is seeking to deport without a chance for bond — even if they have no criminal records and have resided in the country for decades.

A panel of Republican appointees on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Wednesday that the administration had properly determined that federal law doesn’t only allow — but requires — ICE to detain the vast majority of people it is seeking to deport. That includes millions of immigrants who have long been treated as eligible for bond hearings.

The ruling carries particularly acute implications for Minnesota, where federal district judges are bound to follow it. Hundreds of people detained during the recent ICE crackdown in the Twin Cities have filed petitions for release from custody by challenging the administration’s interpretation of the law, and nearly every district judge in the state had sided with the petitioners.

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At the heart of the issue is a 30-year-old immigration statute that requires the detention — without bond — of all “applicants for admission” to the United States while they are “seeking admission” to the country. For decades, administrations of both parties treated this law as applying only to recent border-crossers. Those who resided in the country for years, and sometimes decades, were not “seeking admission” because they were already here, they reasoned.

But last July, ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons concluded that those residing in the United States without admission would be subject to mandatory detention. And he won backup in September from the Justice Department-run Board of Immigration Appeals, which oversees the immigration courts that handle deportation proceedings for thousands of immigrants nationwide.

That decision led to a flood of arrests and a corresponding flood of emergency lawsuits filed by ICE detainees who say they should never have been locked up in the first place — and that ICE’s new position would require the detention of millions, far more than Congress could ever have envisioned in 1996.

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