Appeals Court Sharply Limits Ice’s Massive Expansion Of Detention

A federal appeals court has sharply curtailed ICE’s bid to detain thousands of people without bond under a dramatic expansion of mandatory detention for immigrants who have established roots in the United States.

The 2-1 ruling of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that people detained by ICE while awaiting the outcome of their deportation proceedings — under the Trump administration's newly expanded policy — must be afforded a bond hearing within 90 days. Anything less would be a violation of their constitutional due process rights.

“It is part of the historic majesty of this long-ago founding charter that it makes no exceptions in providing basic rights to those within our boundaries, including a right to be heard when personal liberty is taken,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick, a George W. Bush appointee, who was joined by Judge James Graves, an Obama appointee. Judge Cory Wilson, a Trump appointee, dissented.

The panel emphasized that the vast majority of people targeted under the new policy were people without criminal records — therefore not dangers to their communities — whose established lives in the country make them unlikely to flee their immigration proceedings. The minimal risk of affording due process, they said, undercut the administration’s push to detain them en masse.

The ruling is an enormous victory for ICE detainees, who have challenged the administration’s mandatory detention policies as a draconian violation of due process rights that could affect millions of immigrants who have resided in the United States for years.

Those challenges are rooted in a July 2025 policy shift by ICE, which reinterpreted 30-year-old laws requiring the detention — without bond — of people apprehended crossing the border or soon after. Under ICE’s new view, which was not adopted by any prior administration, that mandatory detention would be applied to people apprehended in the interior of the country as well, even if they established roots in the United States decades ago.

The result was a flood of emergency lawsuits all over the country for people subjected to mandatory detention under ICE’s new approach. Judges nationwide have overwhelmingly rebuked the policy as illegal and unconstitutional, with the fight likely to reach the Supreme Court in a matter of months. Rejections of the Trump administration’s detention policy have fueled the vast majority of more than 14,300 rulings against ICE detentions that POLITICO has tracked over the last year.

The 5th Circuit’s decision carries outsized influence because it governs immigration lawsuits in Texas, where a disproportionate number of ICE detainees are held. The ruling also undercuts a decision by a different 5th Circuit panel in February that upheld the administration’s reinterpretation of the mandatory detention law.

Notably, Graves, in a concurrence, advocated for requiring bond hearings even sooner than 90 days, while Wilson argued that no Supreme Court precedent required the government to afford bond hearings to people held while awaiting deportation.

The ruling is likely to reverberate quickly in hundreds of cases brought by ICE detainees in Texas, who have challenged their detention and, until now, been denied release or a bond hearing.

The Ohio-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals similarly found a due process right for ICE detainees when it rejected the administration’s detention policy last month. The Trump administration recently urged the Supreme Court to take up the issue and settle it once and for all.

Importantly, the panel did not prescribe the format or standards of the bond hearings that must be conducted. Though the judges emphasized that dangerousness and flight risk are typically the basis of bond determinations, the panel left the ultimate decision — and the standard of proof that could govern such hearings — up to the Trump administration. Arriving at the proper standard could, the majority noted, require further litigation in federal court.