Appeals court backs Trump in major fight over detaining long-time illegal immigrants

A federal appeals court delivered a major boost to President Trump on Friday, ruling in favor of his administration’s new interpretation of immigration law that would let him hold long-time illegal migrants in detention while they fight their deportations.

The vast majority of federal courts that have looked at the issue have come out the other way, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling late Friday, said the administration is reading the law properly.

“After reviewing carefully the relevant provisions and structure of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, the statutory history, and Congressional intent, we conclude that the government’s position is correct,” wrote Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee.

Her ruling came in two cases of Mexican illegal immigrants nabbed last year as Homeland Security ramped up Mr. Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Under a new DHS policy, the government said the migrants were being held in immigration detention without the chance for bond, and immigration courts upheld those determinations.

They went to regular federal courts to file habeas corpus petitions challenging their detention, and the district judges sided with them, ruling that the law didn’t allow mandatory detention and they must have a chance to get a bond hearing before an immigration judge.

At issue is whether long-time migrants who sneaked across the border and have been living here for years are still considered “applicants for admission” to the U.S., which would place them under Section 1225 of the immigration code, allowing mandatory detention.

The migrants argue that they may be applicants for admission but they weren’t actually “seeking admission” at the time they were arrested. That, the migrants argued, meant they should be treated under Section 1226 of the immigration code, which does allow for bond if they don’t have serious criminal records and don’t pose a security threat.

Hundreds of district court rulings have blessed that argument, saying no previous administration exercised the law the way the Trump administration does.

But Judge Jones, joined by Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee, said just because others were more lenient doesn’t mean the law bars what Mr. Trump is doing.

“In contrast to past administrations, the current administration has chosen to exercise a greater portion of its authority by treating applicants for admission under the provision designed to apply to them,” Judge Jones wrote.

Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee, delivered a blistering dissent, saying her colleagues were stretching the law beyond its breaking point.

“The majority stakes the largest detention initiative in American history on the possibility that ’seeking admission’ is like being an ‘applicant for admission,’ in a statute that has never been applied in this way, based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained — some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens,” she wrote.

The 5th Circuit becomes the first appeals court to rule on the Trump detention fight, though the issue is pending before others.

Legal analysts expect the matter to end up at the Supreme Court soon.

Detention is at the heart of immigration enforcement. If migrants are held in detention, their deportation cases are heard faster and, if they lose, they can be immediately ousted.

If set free, many won’t show up for their hearings and will ignore their deportation orders once issued. More than a million migrants are believed to be at large in the U.S., defying final orders of removal.

That’s why the Trump administration has set records for detention beds and why it pushed the new practice of mandatory detention.

Migrants and their lawyers have pushed back, filing thousands of habeas corpus petitions demanding release.

About 8,500 petitions have been filed just since Jan. 1. More than 700 of those have been filed in Minnesota, where the administration is pursuing a major immigration operation.