Supreme Court Takes Up Challenge to Trump-Era Mandatory Detention Rule

The Supreme Court agreed in October to hear Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, a case that tests the Trump administration’s 2025 reinterpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The rule treats anyone who entered the United States without inspection as “seeking admission,” requiring mandatory detention without bond for the duration of immigration proceedings. The case centers on Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a Brazilian citizen who crossed the southern border more than two decades ago, built a construction business in Massachusetts, and was detained in September. A district court in Western New York ordered his release with a bond hearing in October; the government appealed, turning the dispute into a nationwide circuit-split.

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In July 2025 ICE issued a memo expanding mandatory detention to long-time undocumented residents, lumping them with recent border crossers, suspected terrorists and certain criminal defendants. The policy overturns a decades-old practice that granted bond hearings to most detainees.

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• Judges have ruled against the administration in over 85 % of at least 24,100 federal immigration-detention cases, with two-thirds of those decisions targeting the new mandatory-detention rule.

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• ICE’s peak daily population reached about 73,000 detainees; from the start of Trump’s second term through early August, over 610,000 people were booked, and more than 50,000 arrests occurred in a single August month.

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• Estimates place the undocumented population at around 6 million today, up from about 2 million in 1996 when the INA overhaul was signed.

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• The Fifth Circuit, covering Texas and Louisiana, holds over a third of the nation’s ICE detainees, a region where the mandatory-detention rule has been upheld.

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Judge Joseph F. Judge Nicole Berner (Biden appointee) likened it to historic internments, noting that past detentions were “limited in scope” compared with the current policy. Michael Tan**, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project and counsel of record, called the case “unprecedented” and warned that the stakes are “enormously high” across historical, legal, and human dimensions.

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• “Those shameful and abhorrent past detentions were limited in scope in comparison to the mandatory detention that the Government urges us today to find that Congress established thirty years ago in an ambiguously worded statutory provision,” — Judge Nicole Berner

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• “At a minimum, the transfers are faster,” — May. Rebecca Cassler, a senior litigation attorney with the American Immigration Council

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• “The Supreme Court rejecting the government’s argument here is just one step of many that would be needed to bring actual justice to this system,” — May. Rebecca Cassler, a senior litigation attorney with the American Immigration Council

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