The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow mandatory immigration detention without bond hearings, including for some noncitizens who have lived in the United States for years.

Split Circuit Courts Force SCOTUS Review

The request, made public Friday, challenges a May ruling by a 2-to-1 panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Two other federal appeals courts have upheld the policy, while three have struck it down. Hundreds of lower-court judges have also rejected it, leading to thousands of active lawsuits. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to resolve what he called a “critically important question of immigration law.”

The filing follows a pair of high-court wins for the administration on Thursday, when the conservative 6-3 majority allowed removal protections to be stripped from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.

A Sweeping Reinterpretation of Immigration Law

The cases before the 6th Circuit involved citizens of Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Guatemala who had resided in the U.S. for years before arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.

The court ruled the administration misread the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and that mandatory detention violated detainees’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment.

The dispute stems from a 2024 Department of Homeland Security decision that classified noncitizens already living in the United States, not just those arriving at the border, as "applicants for admission," making them subject to mandatory detention without eligibility for bond hearings.