Court will decide if detention statute still binds

In September 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stopped Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha as he drove to work in Norwood, Massachusetts, and arrested him.

He had entered the United States illegally around 2004 or 2005 and was still here two decades later.

That timeline is the policy argument in one life. Barbosa da Cunha applied for asylum in 2016. He remained free in the interior until the arrest. An immigration judge then ruled his detention mandatory under new Department of Homeland Security guidance. He sought a bond hearing. A New York district court later released him on bond after finding the policy did not apply to him. The Second Circuit sided against the government. On October 1, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Rhoney v. Barbosa de Cunha and settle whether federal law requires what DHS ordered.

The conservative case is plain. National sovereignty includes the power to decide who may enter and who may remain free while removal is pending. Congress wrote mandatory detention for aliens treated as applicants for admission. For nearly three decades, administrations read that rule mainly at the border and allowed many people already living inside the country without legal status to seek bond. In July 2025, DHS issued guidance requiring mandatory detention without bond hearings for the duration of deportation proceedings. The department said that under President Trump it finally implemented the law as Congress intended it to, and that the shift put the nail in the coffin for Biden’s catch-and-release policies.

Catch-and-release is not a slogan in this record. It is the practical result of releasing people who entered without admission, then hoping they appear years later. Barbosa da Cunha’s path—illegal entry, years of presence, an asylum filing in 2016, and no removal until a traffic stop in 2025—shows why detention pending proceedings is a rule-of-law tool, not a flourish. When the government cannot hold people it has charged as removable, hearings become optional for the respondent and enforcement becomes a paper exercise for the taxpayer. Limited government does not mean an open interior. It means the executive enforces the statutes on the books rather than a custom of release that accumulated after 1996.

The number of migrants in detention rose from just under 38,000 at the end of the Biden administration to more than 65,000 by summer 2026.

In July, ICE detained more than 46,000 people for removal, up from 43,000 in June.

Michael K.T. Tan, a lawyer for Barbosa da Cunha, stated the challengers’ case in full. “The courts have repeatedly and resoundingly rejected the Trump administration’s radical misinterpretation of the law. Try as it might, the government cannot twist the law to detain immigrants for months or even years on end without a bond hearing,” Tan said. “Not only is it cruel and inhumane; it is unlawful.”

That is the strongest framing the record supplies for the other side: long practice, bond as the default for interior arrests, and detention without a hearing as both unlawful and harsh. The answer is not adjective for adjective. It is text and consequence. DHS’s position is that noncitizens already residing in the United States without admission still qualify as applicants for admission and therefore fall under mandatory detention without bond while their cases proceed. Prior administrations, including the first Trump term, did not read the 1996 law that way for the interior. Habit is not amendment. A practice of release does not rewrite a detention mandate, and the ordinary American who funds the courts and the removal system is entitled to a statute that means what it says when someone has been present without status for twenty years.

Judge Joseph Bianco, writing for the Second Circuit, rejected what he called the government’s “newfound interpretation” and described the policy as “the broadest mass detention-without-bond mandate in our nation’s history for millions of noncitizens.” The Second Circuit judges wrote that even if the government’s newfound interpretation were plausible—and it is not—they would reject it to avoid serious constitutional questions attendant to that mandate. They also wrote that Congress has never challenged the settled practice despite making numerous amendments to the immigration laws.

Congressional silence is not a repeal. If the settled practice contradicted the detention Congress ordered for applicants for admission, the remedy was legislation, not a permanent administrative override. Public safety and orderly removal both depend on people remaining available for hearings. Free enterprise and the wage earner bear the costs when interior enforcement is episodic and release is routine. Faith and family communities live with the disorder of a border and an interior that do not match the law as written. The record does not supply a Democratic committee reply or a governor’s statement on this case; it supplies the circuit conflict and the volume of litigation that followed the guidance.

The Second and Sixth Circuits ruled against the policy. The Fifth and Eighth Circuits allowed no-bond detention. Overall, two appeals courts have allowed the approach and nine have ruled against it.

More than 73,000 related lawsuits were filed in federal court this year.

That is about a quarter of all civil suits filed.

A Reuters analysis in February found judges ruled detentions unlawful more than 4,400 times.

The flood of petitions is real. So is the patchwork: mandatory detention in some circuits, bond and release in others, while the same federal statute is supposed to apply nationwide. Sovereignty cannot operate as a lottery of geography. The rule of law cannot mean that an illegal entrant’s right to remain free during removal turns on which appellate court sits over the jail. The administration’s guidance restored a single national reading aimed at ending the release pipeline that left Barbosa da Cunha free from roughly 2004 until 2025. The courts below fractured. The justices will resolve the split.

Oral arguments are expected in the term that begins in October 2026, with some sources pointing to early 2027, and a decision expected by June 2027. The detention count that climbed past 65,000 is the concrete stake the interior already feels while the Court decides whether Congress’s mandate still binds.