Supreme Court to Review Trump ICE Mandatory Detention Policy

The Supreme Court agreed Thursday to review the Trump administration’s policy of holding illegal immigrants in detention without a bond hearing while their deportation cases move forward.

The case, Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, is one of the first the justices took after returning from their summer recess, and it lands on the docket days before the term opens Monday.

The fight goes back to July 2025, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a guidance memo. For about 30 years, only immigrants caught at the border or those with certain criminal convictions could be held without a bond hearing. Everyone else arrested inside the country could ask an immigration judge to let them out on bond. The ICE memo threw that out. It told officers to treat anyone who entered the country illegally, no matter how long ago, as if they were still standing at the border seeking admission, which strips them of the right to a bond hearing.

The administration leaned on a part of federal law that says such immigrants “shall be detained,” rather than the older provision that lets a judge release them on a bond of at least $1,500.

The man the case is named for shows how far the policy reaches. Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a Brazilian national, entered the United States without papers around 2005. He applied for asylum in 2016, got a work permit, bought a home, and ran a small business. Then ICE arrested him in 2025. An immigration judge said the new policy blocked any bond hearing, so he took his case to federal court, and the New York-based Second Circuit sided with him.

The courts have been pulling in opposite directions ever since the memo took effect. The Fifth and Eighth Circuits backed the administration. The Second, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits went the other way. By one Politico count, federal district judges have ruled against the policy more than 9,300 times.

Justice Department lawyers told the court the split had created an unworkable patchwork, where an immigrant is locked up in one part of the country and released in another.

The grant comes as Trump keeps up an immigration crackdown that has defined his second term, with ICE reporting more than 356,000 removals in fiscal year 2026. It also puts the policy before three justices Trump appointed, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, whom he said this week he regrets picking.

Arguments are expected early next year.