The Supreme Court is being asked by the Trump administration to step into a simmering legal conflict over whether migrants caught inside the country can be locked up without ever seeing an immigration judge for a bond hearing. A petition filed in June, Raycraft v. Lopez-Campos, is just one of several high-stakes appeals the administration has waiting before the justices as summer winds down.
At the heart of the dispute is a provision of federal immigration law, 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A), which governs how an immigration officer decides whether someone has a lawful basis to enter the U.S. The law says that when an officer determines a noncitizen is “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted,” that person “shall be detained” while removal proceedings move forward.
Before the administration rolled out its current guidelines last year, the government generally didn’t use that section for people who had already been living in the U.S., sometimes for years or decades, according to the petition. Those individuals were instead processed under a different statute, Section 1226, which gives the attorney general leeway to let someone out on “bond of at least $1,500” or “conditional parole” while their deportation case is pending. By shifting these cases to Section 1225, the administration has effectively eliminated the possibility of bond for people picked up within U.S. borders.
The federal appeals courts are sharply divided on the issue. Six circuits have now rejected the administration’s approach, including the 9th and 7th Circuits just last week. On the other side, the 5th and 8th Circuits have backed the government, agreeing that anyone who entered illegally is still an “applicant for admission” under Section 1225 and therefore has no right to a bond hearing.
The Lopez-Campos case stems from a May ruling by the 6th Circuit, which found the government’s detention of the challengers under Section 1225 unlawful. In asking the justices to take up the case, Solicitor General D. John Sauer pointed to what was then a 3-2 circuit split—now 6-2—and urged the Court to settle the “critically important question” of whether Section 1225 covers noncitizens “present in the United States without having been admitted” and whether they must “be detained while their removal proceedings unfold.” He warned that without a definitive ruling, “the volume of [such] litigation” would “continue to impose immense burdens on district courts and U.S. Attorney’s Offices throughout the nation.”
A second petition on the same policy arrived in late July, this one challenging a 2nd Circuit decision that, like the 6th Circuit’s, said Section 1226—not Section 1225—governs detention of migrants found inside the country. In that filing, Sauer pointed the justices to Lopez-Campos and asked them to hear that case first, holding the newer petition until they rule. The administration’s win in the 5th Circuit has also been appealed to the Supreme Court.
Politico’s analysis of court records found that judges nationwide have pushed back on the government’s reading of Section 1225, with “more than 9,300 rulings against the administration’s” mandatory detention policy since it took effect last year.
The justices are slated to weigh these petitions at their “long conference” on Sept. 28. Also pending before the Court are administration appeals involving Second Amendment rights, the U.S. DOGE Service, and access to government records, with another major filing—on transgender military service—expected before the end of August.
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