Supreme Court will rule on Trump’s ICE detention policy
Por Kyle Cheney — POLITICO – TOP Stories
The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether ICE’s unprecedented mandatory detention policy — which lower courts have rejected more than 20,000 times — is legal.
It’s one of the biggest blockbuster cases so far for the court’s next term, which opens Monday.
ICE’s novel interpretation of federal immigration law has overwhelmed courts across the nation and upended tens of thousands of lives. Lower courts have resoundingly rejected the policy, ruling that ICE cannot detain tens of thousands of people — who typically don’t have criminal records and are pursuing pathways to legal status — without offering them a chance to make a case for remaining in their communities while those proceedings play out.
The court also added two other cases to its docket on Thursday: a dispute over a Catholic church’s bid to construct a shrine on its property and a fight over how veterans’ benefits are allocated during a divorce.
The justices have already lined up several other cases to be argued this fall, including a major showdown over climate-change litigation against oil companies, a fight over efforts to ban AR-15 assault weapons; challenges to “third country” deportations; and a dispute over whether Catholic churches providing government-funded day care can ban children of gay couples.
At issue in the immigration case is the administration’s interpretation of a 1996 law that provided for the mandatory detention of people who recently crossed the U.S. border without permission. Every prior administration, including President Donald Trump’s first, applied that detention requirement only to recent border-crossers.
But last year, the administration said the law would now also apply to millions of people who had established long-term roots in the country — often with spouses and children who are U.S. citizens — while their immigration proceedings were underway.
ICE’s bid to enforce this new interpretation led to a tsunami of emergency lawsuits that have flooded courts nationwide, strained the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary and uprooted thousands of people without criminal records, who were whisked away to detention centers across the country.
The vast majority of judges to consider the administration’s new policy — including a majority of Trump-appointed judges — have rejected it, saying Congress could not have adopted the largest mass-detention program in U.S. history in 1996 without telling anyone and without any administration noticing it until now.
More than 460 federal judges have rejected ICE detentions more than 20,000 times in the 14 months since the policy was implemented, according to a POLITICO analysis.
The results were similarly lopsided in the nation’s 11 regional federal appeals courts, which rejected the policy 9-2. But court watchers pointed to clues in those appellate decisions that could signal a more sympathetic Supreme Court.
The specific case before the Supreme Court comes from the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which was the first appeals court to rule against the administration on the issue. The case hinges on ICE’s interpretation of the 1996 immigration law, not broader constitutional questions the Justice Department had encouraged the justices to also consider.
Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories
