Can Trump Detain Immigrants Indefinitely? The Supreme Court Steps In
The administration wants the legal power to lock up undocumented immigrants indefinitely without a shot at bail, even if they lived here for decades with clean records.
The whole legal showdown comes down to an immigration law passed back in 1996. For decades, if immigration enforcement picked someone up inside the country, that person had the basic right to stand before a judge and ask for bond while waiting for their hearing.
The current administration completely tore up that playbook. Their stance is straightforward: if someone lacks legal status, they get locked up with no bail hearing whatsoever, no matter how many years they have quietly lived and worked in the country. That hardline shift pushed the detention population to around 65,000 people.
About 70% of those detainees have never been convicted of a crime, and plenty are legal applicants trapped in absurd governmental backlogs. Lower courts routinely struck the mandatory lockups down, pointing out the 1996 statute was meant for people nabbed right at the border. But federal lawyers claim that letting settled immigrants post bond creates a "perverse incentive" to evade border patrol.
The high court agreed to settle the wording of the statute, while pointedly declining to touch whether holding someone forever without bond violates the Constitution.
Keeping tens of thousands of people behind bars on the taxpayer dime turned out to be easier than actually hiring enough judges to process paperwork.
Source: The Hill
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