A federal appeals court has revived a class-action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of bond-hearing procedures for detained noncitizens, ruling that a lower court applied the wrong legal standard when it decertified the class. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated the decertification order and sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings.
The case, Onosamba-Ohindo v. Ball, was brought by Junior Onosamba-Ohindo, a noncitizen who was held in discretionary immigration detention after being ordered released on a bond he could not pay. He sued on behalf of a putative class of noncitizens subject to the same bond-hearing procedures at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, New York. The lawsuit alleged that the government's procedures for determining whether a noncitizen should remain in detention violate due process.
In 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York certified the class under Rule 23(b)(2), concluding that the claims raised systemic due-process defects and that injunctive relief altering the procedures would be indivisible and proper for the entire class. The court also issued a class-wide preliminary injunction requiring the government to change its bond-hearing procedures, which the government complied with.
Two years later, the Supreme Court decided Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez, holding that lower courts lack jurisdiction to issue class-wide injunctive relief barring the operation of certain provisions of the INA, including the provision at issue in this case. Following that decision, the district court decertified the class and denied Onosamba-Ohindo's motion for summary judgment as moot.
The Second Circuit panel, in a per curiam opinion, found that while the district court did not err in decertifying the class for injunctive relief, its decision to decertify the class for declaratory relief was based on factors not relevant to the class-certification analysis. The court called that decision an abuse of discretion.
"We conclude that its decision to decertify the class for declaratory relief was based on factors that are not relevant to the class-certification analysis,