A federal appeals court has shot down the Trump White House’s policy of locking up almost everyone it tries to deport, ruling that individuals must be given the chance to obtain bond as they seek to remain in the country, Politico reports.
The number of people held in federal immigrant detention sites has exploded since Trump began his second term. As part of the administration’s bid to carry out the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history, it frequently imprisons people with no criminal record and those who have lived in the country for years, if not decades.
A panel of the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 that ICE’s policy of jailing people without bond is based on flawed and implausible readings of decades-old laws, according to Politico. Beyond that, the court said it has serious constitutional concerns over “what would be the broadest mass-detention-without bond mandate in our Nation’s history.”
“The government’s interpretation … would send a seismic shock through our immigration detention system and society, straining our already overcrowded detention infrastructure, incarcerating millions, separating families, and disrupting communities,” Judge Joseph Bianco, a Trump appointee, wrote the decision obtained by Politico. “If Congress meant to achieve such a radical break from the past, it would not have done so in such an indirect and ambiguous way.”
Indeed, the historic jump in federal incarceration has spurred a federal spending spree as the Department of Homeland Security spends billions on warehouse facilities nationwide to serve as immigrant lockups.
Earlier this spring, the federal government closed a deal to buy a 640,000-square-foot warehouse on San Antonio’s East Side to serve as a “processing facility” for detained migrants. The plan has received pushback from city and county officials, although their ability to put the brakes on the development are limited by federal law.
ICE currently has 60,311 people locked up in detention, according to the nonpartisan federal data-monitoring group Transactional Access Records Clearing House. Nearly 71% of those people have no criminal convictions, federal reports show.
The New York ruling is at odds with earlier court decisions on the administration’s policy by Louisiana’s notoriously right-leaning 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Missouri-based 8th Circuit. That disagreement could push a final legal decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to Politico.
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