The US supreme court agreed on Thursday to take up a case challenging the Trump administration’s practice of indefinite detention for undocumented immigrants living in the US and awaiting deportation proceedings.
At the center of the immigration case is a dispute over Donald Trump’s reinterpretation of a longstanding policy that has led to a huge surge in the number of migrants held in detention centers.
For years, undocumented immigrants, who had been living in the US could be released back into their communities on bond, so long as they did not pose a threat to safety or were considered a flight risk.
But last year, administration officials reinterpreted the statute to mean any migrant who entered the US illegally should be held in detention while awaiting legal proceedings.
The case was the latest Trump-era immigration policy to be added to the high court’s docket this term.
This week, justices said they would hear arguments in a case challenging the administration’s “third-country” deportations, which allow immigrants to be sent to a country other than their own.
The challenger to the Trump administration’s reinterpreted policy denying bond hearings is Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a Brazilian citizen who has been living in the US for more than 20 years.
Authorities say Barbosa da Cunha entered the US illegally in or around 2005. He owns a home in Massachusetts, runs a small construction company, has a wife and two US-born children, and has never been charged with a crime.
He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last year while driving to work and moved to an immigration detention facility in Buffalo, New York.
Barbosa da Cunha had requested a bond hearing but was denied.
A district court sided with Barbosa da Cunha, ordering the government to give him a bond hearing. An appeals court affirmed that decision after the administration appealed.
But now lawyers for the government are asking the supreme court to intervene.
The dispute is not unique to Barbosa da Cunha; lower courts have been split on the Trump administration’s policy reinterpretation in other immigration cases as well.
More than 500 district court judges and nine of the 11 federal appeals courts who have heard similar cases have rejected the Trump administration’s new interpretation, according to the New York Times.
Judges have largely agreed that the statute the Trump administration is using to indefinitely detain undocumented immigrants only applies to those who have been apprehended at a port of entry, such as the US-Mexico border.
