The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to let federal authorities detain illegal aliens without bail hearings while their deportation cases play out — a policy the open-border bar and compliant judges have spent a year dismantling, and one that directly determines whether tens of thousands of foreign nationals walk free inside the United States before their removal is decided.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the petition seeking to reverse a May ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that illegal aliens living in the U.S. interior cannot be classified as "applicants for admission" subject to mandatory detention under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. The 6th Circuit, in a 2-1 decision by Judges Eric Clay and R. Guy Cole, ruled that holding such aliens without individualized bond hearings violated the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. Judge Eric Murphy dissented.
The stakes are straightforward. ICE held roughly 73,000 people in custody as of January — a record — and the no-bail policy underpins that detention system, according to Newsmax. A ruling for the administration keeps the practice alive nationwide. A ruling against it forces bail hearings for tens of thousands of detainees and likely accelerates releases into American communities.
The policy originated in a July 2025 ICE memo signed by then-acting Director Todd M. Lyons, which reclassified every illegal alien as an "applicant for admission" and stripped immigration judges of authority to hold bail hearings for that population. The Board of Immigration Appeals adopted the same interpretation in September 2025, and immigration judges across the country began ordering detention without release.
The Guardian framed the policy as "bucking a longstanding interpretation of immigration law" and emphasized that it targets people "who have lived in the country for years." Breitbart noted that judges have delivered more than 9,300 rulings against the administration's policy, which Politico described as "overwhelmingly rejected" by federal district court judges who called it a "draconian violation of the law and constitutional due process rights."
What the establishment coverage buries: the circuit courts are split 3-2 against the administration, with the 5th and 8th circuits endorsing the policy and the 2nd, 6th, and 11th circuits rejecting it. Sauer told the justices this "untenable divide" on a "critically important question of immigration law" is fueling thousands of detainee lawsuits nationwide and warrants swift Supreme Court review.
The filing landed one day before the high court handed the administration twin immigration wins, including a 6-3 decision allowing the rollback of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrian immigrants.
The core question the Court will decide: whether foreign nationals who entered this country illegally and were later picked up by ICE are entitled to more due process protections than the American citizens bearing the cost of fentanyl, crime, and shattered communities the current catch-and-release regime enables. The establishment calls it a civil liberties issue. Working Americans call it a sovereignty issue. The Supreme Court will now decide which framing prevails.
