Another appeals court ruled this Thursday that the Donald Trump administration cannot deny the right to bond to immigrants detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is the fifth court to rule against this policy adopted in July of last year as part of the mass arrest and deportation campaign promoted by the President of the United States, which has since sparked a wave of federal lawsuits across the country.
This time, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco voted 2-1 to reject the denial of bonds, despite one of its members being a judge appointed by Trump himself. In the past year, four other courts have rejected the measure.
On July 2, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans concluded that detaining a person for more than 90 days without a bond hearing violates their constitutional right to due process. Days earlier, on June 30, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver also rejected the denial of a bond hearing for immigrant Rigoberto Santillán Quiroz, who had been detained for eight months. Until then, more than 450 district judges across the country had reached the same conclusion about the illegality of keeping immigrants detained without the possibility of bond.
The policy denying bond to immigrants with ongoing proceedings was adopted by the Trump administration in July 2025, denying due process protections, federal law, and the practices that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had maintained until then. Until that moment, mandatory detention without bond had been reserved for people who had been detained upon entering the country or shortly after crossing the border. Since this policy change, overcrowding and neglect in detention centers across the country have worsened.
The blocking of this policy by the appeals courts opens the possibility for the Supreme Court to intervene to resolve the matter. Except for the decision that upheld the right to citizenship for children of foreigners born on U.S. soil, the country’s highest court has supported several aspects of Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda. Among its rulings, it allowed ending temporary protections for people who fled wars and other states of turmoil in their countries; allowed the government to limit the number of asylum applications; and granted greater discretion to immigration officials in dealing with permanent residents, green card holders, when they return to the country from abroad.
