Supreme Court to Decide Whether Immigrants Can Be Held Without Bond Hearings

The Supreme Court agreed on Thursday to decide whether the federal government may hold immigrants who have lived in the United States for years in detention without giving them a chance to ask a judge for release on bond while their deportation cases move forward.

The case was one of three the justices added to their docket days before the new term opens on Monday. Arguments are expected in the coming months, with a decision due by the end of June 2027.

At the center of the case is Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a citizen of Brazil who, according to court filings described by the Associated Press and Fox News, entered the country without inspection about two decades ago and applied for asylum in 2016. Immigration agents arrested him in September 2025 after a traffic stop in Norwood, Massachusetts, NBC News reported. The government argued that the law required him to stay locked up. A federal district judge disagreed and ordered a bond hearing, the federal appeals court in New York upheld that ruling, and an immigration judge later found he was neither a flight risk nor a danger and set bond. His lawyers say he has no criminal record.

The dispute turns on how to read a 1996 immigration law. For roughly three decades, most immigrants without criminal records who were arrested far from the border could ask for a bond hearing. Since last summer, the administration has treated anyone it considers to have entered the country illegally as subject to mandatory detention, wherever and whenever they are arrested.

Lower courts have split. Nine federal appeals courts have rejected the administration’s reading, according to Fox News, while the Fifth and Eighth Circuits sided with the government. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the challengers, says hundreds of district judges have ruled against the policy and that millions of people could eventually be covered by it.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices the matter is a critically important question of immigration law. The administration’s strongest argument is one of fairness among migrants: it says the old practice rewarded people who evaded capture at the border by giving them easier access to release than those stopped as they arrived, and that thousands of conflicting court petitions are disrupting the orderly running of the system.

Lawyers for Barbosa da Cunha answer that holding a long-settled resident with a citizen family and no criminal history serves no purpose but punishment. ACLU lawyer Michael Tan said the government cannot lawfully keep people locked up for months or years without a hearing.

The stakes are large. The immigration detention population topped 73,000 in mid-January, about 75 percent higher than a year earlier, according to figures from the American Immigration Council cited by Fox News. The case does not cover immigrants convicted of certain crimes, who may already be held until deportation under a separate provision.