The Supreme Court on Thursday said it would review the legality of the Trump administration’s novel policy of denying bond hearings to immigrants swept up in its immigration crackdown.
The case is one of the first the Supreme Court has accepted since its summer recess ended, and it promises to be among the most consequential of the term that officially begins next week.
Without the opportunity to request a bond hearing, some immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have spent months in detention facilities while awaiting their removal proceedings.
In the past, immigrants who had been residing inside the United States during their arrest were allowed to request a bond hearing before an immigration judge. That changed after President Donald Trump took office last year.
Under Trump, ICE officials implemented a policy of detaining immigrants throughout their removal proceedings without the opportunity to post bond and wait out the proceedings outside of a detention facility.
That policy means that tens of thousands of immigrants arrested during Trump’s sweeping crackdown have remained in mandatory detention.
Numerous migrants have fought their detention and have won relief from lower courts. At the same time, a Washington Post examination of such cases found that ICE had violated several dozen court orders directing that the detainees be granted a bond hearing or be set free.
The Supreme Court will examine whether a patchwork of statutory provisions in immigration law authorizes the mandatory detention policy.
The high court ruled on several other consequential immigration cases this past summer, including a decision blocking Trump’s effort to limit the constitutional promise of birthright citizenship for most children born on U.S. soil. That issue may return to the Supreme Court after Trump renewed his effort to limit birthright citizenship through an executive order signed after the ruling.
The justices, in ideologically split decisions, have allowed Trump to move forward with other immigration policies, such as the cancellation of temporary humanitarian protections for Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
The court has also said immigration officials can block migrants from crossing the U.S. border to claim asylum.
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