A Trump administration policy to deny bond hearings to immigrants who entered the country without authorization was upheld by an immigration appellate board Friday, expanding mandatory detention to thousands of people already behind bars and potentially millions more nationwide.
Although the policy is being challenged in federal court, the ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals is likely to send an immediate chill through immigration courts where judges for decades have released individuals on bond whom they did not deem a flight risk or danger.
Those judges are now bound by the board’s decision. Immigration courts are not part of the judicial branch but fall under the Department of Justice.
Immigrant rights attorneys say holding immigrants throughout their cases — a process that can sometimes take years — is intended to break the spirit of many and force them to sign their own deportation orders.
“This is an effort to increase the number of people in detention significantly,” said Niels W. Frenzen, director of the USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic, who is part of a team of attorneys who have filed habeas petitions for dozens of immigrants picked up during the summer raids in Los Angeles.
“Literally millions of people are now subject to being held without bond,” he said.
One of those is Ana Franco Galdamez, a mother of two U.S. citizens who has been in the country for two decades. She was getting treatment for breast cancer when she was arrested in a June 19 raid in Los Angeles County, where nearly 1 million undocumented immigrants reside, according to estimates.
She was denied bond and missed treatment, but she was eventually released after a lawyer filed a habeas case.
“Detention conditions are horrific, and they’ve gotten even worse,” Frenzen said. “The goal of the administration is to make it difficult for people to fight their cases and to give up.”
Federal judges have ruled in several cases that denying bond violated federal statues and constitutionally protected due process. The group is now seeking to block the no-bond policy in a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Other lawsuits are also pending.
The Trump administration introduced the no-bond policy nationally in a memo in July — paving the way for the mandatory detention of immigrants.
The move came after Congress authorized expanding immigration detention and enforcement amid a crackdown inside courtrooms and at immigration check-ins.
Immigrants, most of whom had been following the rules to adjust, maintain or gain legal status, were arrested and detained.
For months now, those inside the immigration courts system have been pressed to implement Trump Administration policies. Judges have been fired, and the Pentagon has said it is identifying military lawyers and judges to temporarily sit on the bench.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts, did not answer specific questions from The Times — but pointed out that the ruling was a precedent.
“It strips judicial discretion in many cases,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “It basically says, if you entered illegally, only ICE can decide if you get out of detention.”
The Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision stems from the case of a Venezuelan immigrant who crossed the border in November 2022 near El Paso, Texas, and was later granted temporary protected status. That status expired on April 2 after the Trump administration terminated the program, a decision that is also tied up in litigation.
The board determined that immigration judges had no authority to issue bonds because immigrants “who are present in the United States without admission … must be detained for the duration of their removal proceedings.”
In other words, the board’s decision treats people who have been in the U.S. for years the same as newly arriving immigrants at the border, who can be quickly deported without bond.
“We’ve had clients that are pregnant, we’ve had clients that are breastfeeding. We’ve had clients who have never been arrested, let alone commit, convicted of any crime ever, who’ve never missed an ICE check in — they’re all being told, ‘You’re subject to mandatory detention because of this new interpretation by the Trump administration,’” said Jordan Wells, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. “This now solidifies that as the law of the land, unless and until [the] federal circuit court rules otherwise.”
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