A Earthquake Ruling From The Fifth Circuit Court Of Appeals On An Important Immigration Issue -- Detention of Aliens Without Bond Is Lawful.
Thousands of illegal aliens have been ordered released on bond by federal judges based on.established practice of almost 30 years -- but the Fifth Circuit holds that is not required by the statute.
Bottom line at the top: A decision on Friday by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, if sustained by the Supreme Court, will allow the Trump Administration to detain pending removal as many illegal aliens arrested by DHS as it has the physical capacity to hold. Currently that capacity is only around 65,000. But DHS is building more detention facilities, and the expectation is to increase that number to 200,000 by the end of 2026.
Until Friday evening, the effort by the Trump administration to engage in “mass removals” of illegal aliens — a Trump campaign promise — has suffered from two primary hampering factors: 1 ) limited bed space in detention facilities that created a bottleneck; and 2) a practice in place for nearly 30 years that illegal aliens arrested in the interior of the country were almost always released back to their lives while being given a Notice to Appear to initiate removal proceedings against them at some time in the future.
A General Accounting Office Report in December 2024 — at the end of the Biden Administration and based on data from the Biden DOJ’s “Executive Office for Immigration Review” (EOIR) — disclosed that 34% of all removal proceedings ended with an “in absentia” removal orders from 2016 to 2023, meaning the illegal alien failed to appear. This meant to carry out the removal, the illegal alien had to be located and arrested a second time.
Further, as of July 2024, there was a backlog of 3.5 million removal cases pending before immigration judges — almost entirely as a result of more than three years of “Open Border” policies during the Biden Administration.
The math said that nearly 1.2 million illegal aliens released on bond would not appear for their removal hearing before an immigration judge.
Late on Friday night, the Fifth Circuit’s 2-1 decision in a closely watched case held that the Trump Administration has the authority under the immigration statutes to detain — with no bond hearing required — any illegal aliens taken into ICE detention at any location in the country.
