Supreme Court Rules Immigrants Can Be Detained without Bond Hearing Even Years After Release

[Content Note: Nativism.]

Another absolutely devastating ruling on immigrant rights [pdf] from the Supreme Court, allowing the government to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants without a bond hearing — that is, indefinitely — even if they had been released from custody weeks, months, or even years earlier.

In other words, the Supreme Court just gave ICE license to round up undocumented immigrants and detain them indefinitely, even if they had been picked up and released from custody four days or 40 years earlier.

The ruling was 5-4. Ariane de Vogue at CNN reports:

The case centered on whether detention without a bond hearing must occur promptly upon an immigrant's release from criminal custody or whether it can happen months or even years later when the individual has resettled into society. The statute says simply that the detention can occur "when the alien is released" from custody.

...Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the dissent, and took the unusual step of reading the opinion from the bench.

"It runs the gravest risk of depriving those whom the Government has detained of one of the oldest and most important of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms: the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law."

You may recall just over a year ago, in February 2018, I wrote about another dreadful Supreme Court decision regarding detaining immigrants without bond hearings, and I concluded that the Supreme Court had effectively ruled that immigrants can be indefinitely detained. At the time, I was excoriated on social media for my "interpretation" of the ruling — yet now here is the Supreme Court doubling the fuck down on that "interpretation."

I also noted at the time (as on many other occasions): This administration's (mis)treatment of undocumented immigrants is their canary in the coalmine. Their targeting is intolerable on its face, but understand that whatever they are doing to undocumented immigrants, they will target others in the same way eventually. We must resist their nativist strategies not only because they are cruel and indecent and unjust, but also because if we fail to resist them, they will proliferate.

We must resist this with everything we've got, because we are witnessing the erosion of basic rights, including habeas corpus, in domestic courts, being justified by nativist bigotry against immigrants.

If you can't get motivated enough to make noise in defense of immigrants, then get motivated because, if you don't, you'll be next.