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A U.S. federal judge has thrown out an administrative board’s decision endorsing the Trump administration’s policy of subjecting people arrested during its immigration crackdown to mandatory detention — accusing the administration of terrorizing immigrants and recklessly violating the law.
In a ruling late Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Sunshine Sykes in Riverside, Calif., vacated a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals after finding the Trump administration had failed to comply with her earlier order declaring unlawful the underlying policy of denying detainees the chance to seek release on bond.
Sykes said the administration had violated her December ruling that found it was illegally denying many detained immigrants a chance for release.
She ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to provide detainees with notice that they may be eligible for bond and then give them access to a phone to call an attorney within an hour.
Shira Scheindlin, a former U.S. district court judge, says any time a federal officer shoots and injures someone, a federal investigation is required. However, the FBI investigation into the ICE shooting of Renee Good was closed so quickly, people in Minnesota have lost faith in the process, especially since the feds have ruled out any state or local investigation.
U.S. immigration law prescribes mandatory detention for “applicants for admission,” while their cases proceed in immigration courts and says they are ineligible for bond hearings.
Bucking a long-standing interpretation of the law, the DHS last year took the position that non-citizens already residing in the United States also qualify as applicants for admission.
The Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the U.S. Justice Department, issued a decision in September that adopted that interpretation, leading immigration judges across the country to mandate detention.
Sykes’s December ruling declared the DHS policy unlawful but stopped short of vacating the board’s decision.
But she said it was clear further relief was needed after Chief Immigration Judge Teresa Riley issued guidance instructing her colleagues that they are not bound by Sykes’s ruling and that they should continue following the board’s decision.
Those immigration judges are employed by the Justice Department.
Courts divided
The mass detention issue has led to conflicting rulings at various levels of U.S. courts. Earlier this month, a panel from the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the administration’s actions were legal.
But a running tally by Politico shows dozens of other federal judges, along with Sykes, have ruled against the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law.
Sykes, in Wednesday’s decision, criticized the DHS for repeatedly and inaccurately suggesting that operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were limited to targeting criminal non-citizens who were the “worst of the worst.”
“Maybe that phrase merely mirrors the severity and ill-natured conduct by the government,” Sykes wrote.
“Americans have expressed deep concerns over unlawful, wanton acts by the executive branch,” she wrote. “Beyond its terror against noncitizens, the executive branch has extended its violence on its own citizens, killing two American citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.”
Jacob Frey addressed U.S. President Donald Trump directly at a news conference Saturday afternoon following the fatal shooting of a man in Minneapolis by immigration officers, and repeated his call for the Trump administration to end its immigration enforcement campaign in his city.
Sykes’s ruling means the board’s decision can no longer be used by immigration judges to deny bond hearings, says Niels Frenzen, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law who represented the plaintiffs.
“We hope that DHS and the immigration courts will now comply with the court’s orders to provide bond hearings to the thousands of noncitizens who have been arrested,” he said in a statement.
Matt Adams, an attorney for plaintiffs in the lawsuit before Sykes, said he was hopeful her latest ruling would do away with mandatory detention.
“Certainly in the normal course of things, the immigration judges would return to granting bond hearings,” he said.
The U.S. vice-president visited ICE agents in Minneapolis on Thursday, and blamed the massive federal presence in the city on a lack of co-operation from local officials. We speak with Minneapolis-based journalist Jason DeRusha about reactions to JD Vance’s visit and the vice-president’s take on ICE’s detainment of a five-year-old boy.
The White House referred comment Thursday to the DHS, which said in a statement that the U.S. Supreme Court had “repeatedly overruled” lower courts on the issue of mandatory detention.
“ICE has the law and the facts on its side, and it adheres to all court decisions until it ultimately gets them shot down by the highest court in the land,” it said.
The Department of Justice, which oversees the immigration appeals board, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
With access to bond hearings cut off, immigrants by the thousands filed separate petitions in federal court seeking their release. More than 20,000 habeas corpus cases have been filed since Trump’s inauguration, according to federal court records analyzed by The Associated Press.
Judges have granted many of those petitions, but then later found the administration was violating their orders to release people or provide them with other relief.
Sykes, who was nominated by former U.S. president Joe Biden, ruled in November and again in December that the mandatory detention policy violated an act of Congress. She extended her decision to immigrants nationwide. The Republican administration, however, continued denying bond hearings.
Sykes said Wednesday failing to provide immigrants with due process “harms their families, communities, and the fabric of this very nation.”
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