On February 27, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court remanded a case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that challenges the government’s authority to hold an alien in detention indefinitely without a bond hearing. The Court said that certain aliens may be held in detention indefinitely while proceedings are pending, and that periodic bond hearings are not required. In this case, the Supreme Court was asked to interpret several provisions of U.S. immigration law that authorize the government to detain aliens in the course of immigration proceedings.
The Court said that because the Ninth Circuit “erroneously concluded that periodic bond hearings are required under the immigration provisions at issue here, it had no occasion to consider respondents’ constitutional arguments on their merits. Consistent with our role as ‘a court of review, not of first view,’ … we do not reach those arguments. Instead, we remand the case to the Court of Appeals to consider them in the first instance.” The Court also noted several additional issues for the Ninth Circuit to address, such as whether respondents could continue litigating their claims as a class and whether the Court of Appeals continues to have jurisdiction.
The Court observed that all parties appeared to agree that the text of the provisions at issue, when read most naturally, did not give detained aliens the right to periodic bond hearings during the course of their detention. “But by relying on the constitutional avoidance canon of statutory interpretation, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that detained aliens have a statutory right to periodic bond hearings under the provisions at issue,” the Court noted, concluding that “[i]mmigration officials are authorized to detain certain aliens in the course of immigration proceedings while they determine whether those aliens may be lawfully present in the country.”
Justice Breyer dissented, saying he would find it alarming “to believe that Congress wrote these statutory words in order to put thousands of individuals at risk of lengthy confinement all within the United States but all without hope of bail. I would read the statutory words as consistent with, indeed as requiring protection of, the basic right to seek bail.” He said, among other things, that given the “serious constitutional problem” of prolonged detention of noncitizens, he “would interpret the statutory provisions before us as authorizing bail.” He referred to the Declaration of Independence, which states that all have certain rights, among them the right to liberty, and that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause “protects each person’s liberty from arbitrary deprivation.” He also noted that for a long time, “liberty has included the right of a confined person to seek release on bail.” Justice Breyer said, “No one can claim, nor since the time of slavery has anyone to my knowledge successfully claimed, that persons held within the United States are totally without constitutional protection.”
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