Supreme Court to decide lawfulness of Trump’s immigrant detention policy

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Thursday it will consider whether immigrants subject to deportation can be held in detention indefinitely while their cases are adjudicated.

The eventual ruling could endorse or end a key feature of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown.

The case was among three the court took up ahead of the justices’ return to action Monday for a new nine-month term following a summer break. Rulings in all three are due by the end of June.

The focus in the first case is whether such immigrants should have a chance to argue at a bond hearing that they can be released while the deportation process moves forward, which was standard practice under previous presidents.

The justices will hear a Trump administration appeal in the case of Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a man from Brazil who originally entered the United States in the mid-2000s.

He was detained following a traffic stop in Norwood, Massachusetts, in September 2025. He sued, and a federal district judge ordered that he be released. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision on appeal.

Lower courts have been divided on the issue, although the majority have sided with immigrants who have argued that the federal law the Trump administration cites to hold them without a bond hearing only applies to people detained near the border.

Since last summer, the Trump administration has sought to apply that federal law to anyone deemed to have entered the United States illegally, even if they are nowhere near the border and have lived in the country for years.

Several cases on the issue are pending at the Supreme Court.

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In court papers, Solicitor General D. John Sauer called it a “critically important question of immigration law.” The policy removes a “perverse incentive” whereby people who evade detention when they enter the United States get treated more leniently than those detained at the border, he added.

The litigation, Sauer said, is “disrupting the orderly administration of immigration law.”

Thousands of people have already been detained under the policy, which could apply to millions of immigrants if expanded, and many of them have contested it. The case does not concern immigrants who have been convicted of certain crimes. Under federal law, they can be detained until they are deported, although separate lawsuits have raised questions about whether they should be eligible for bond hearings, too.

Challengers, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, said in court papers that the Trump administration policy is a “radical reinterpretation” of immigration law, pointing out that some of those being detained were young children when they crossed the border.

Those challenging their confinement are not a flight risk or a potential danger to the public, ACLU lawyers say.