Eleventh Circuit rejects Trump no-bond ICE policy as circuit split deepens

“Nowhere in the text, structure, or history of the INA does that reading find steady footing.”

That sentence, from the Eleventh Circuit’s 2 to 1 majority opinion handed down Wednesday, dismantled the Trump administration’s argument that millions of immigrants facing deportation could be held without bond hearings. The Atlanta-based court is the second federal appeals court in two weeks to reject the policy. The losses now leave the administration carrying a sharp circuit split into a Supreme Court fight it cannot avoid.

The case turned on which provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act applied. The Justice Department had read 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b), which covers “aliens seeking entry” and provides no bond pathway, as governing the entire universe of removal cases. Civil-liberties lawyers and the immigrants they represent read 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a), which applies to people physically present in the United States and entitles them to a hearing before extended detention.

The Eleventh Circuit went with § 1226(a). It went further on the government’s gloss. The notion that fighting one’s removal counts as “seeking admission,” the court said, “profoundly oversimplifies the manner” in which removal proceedings actually work.

The split, deepening

The Fifth Circuit and the Eighth Circuit, ruling earlier in the policy’s life, had sided with the administration. The Eleventh’s ruling is the second this month against. Two appellate panels now back to back have torn through the same statutory argument the Justice Department put forward.

The Eleventh’s footnotes acknowledged the trajectory directly. The split, the panel wrote, “sets up a glide path for the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the issue.” No certiorari petition has been filed yet. Immigration lawyers expect one within weeks. The Justice Department was not commenting Thursday on whether it would first seek en banc review.

What the policy actually did

In early 2025 the Trump administration directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain anyone it classified as having entered the country without inspection for the entire length of removal proceedings. No bond hearings. No release. The directive swept in long-time residents with US-born children, business owners and people with pending asylum or relief claims, alongside more recent arrivals.

Critics called it mandatory pretrial detention by another name. They had a point. With immigration courts running a backlog of years, anyone caught in the policy could spend a year or more in custody before a final order on their case. Both the Eleventh and the courts that ruled before it cited that practical reality as one of the costs Congress had not, in the panel’s reading, authorised.

Where bond hearings come back

The Eleventh Circuit’s ruling reinstates bond hearings for immigrants detained in Florida, Georgia and Alabama. Florida holds tens of thousands of ICE detainees in any given week, the most in the circuit and among the most in the country.

Whether ICE field offices begin scheduling those hearings immediately is unclear. The agency had not issued public guidance by Thursday afternoon. Practical experience from past appellate losses suggests it will be days at minimum before bond requests are processed at scale, and the immigration courts that handle them are themselves chronically backlogged.

In the Fifth Circuit, the only appeals court still upholding the policy, ICE has continued the no-bond practice. Texas and Louisiana detainees remain under the older rule, at least for now.

What the courts said about scale

The Eleventh Circuit panel did not rule on constitutional grounds. It read the statute. But the opinion lingered on what the government’s reading would mean if accepted: a scheme of preventive detention without bond, applied to millions of people, with no congressional sign-off. That structural framing matters because it gives the Supreme Court a reason to grant certiorari beyond the textual question, and a reason to rule narrowly when it does.

The next moves

Three things are now in motion.

The Justice Department has to choose between en banc review at the Eleventh Circuit, which would stay this ruling temporarily, and a direct shot at the Supreme Court. Lawyers familiar with the administration’s litigation patterns expect a quick Supreme Court application, in line with the aggressive use of emergency relief that has characterised this term’s docket.

ICE has to decide how to handle the bond-hearing flood that is now legally required across the Eleventh’s three states. The agency’s silence Thursday did not suggest a fast operational pivot.

The Supreme Court itself has to take the case. With two circuits on one side and one on the other, the conditions for certiorari are textbook. A merits ruling on any timetable that includes oral argument would not arrive before the next term. The no-bond policy, in other words, is functionally limited for the rest of this calendar year regardless of what happens next.

For immigrants in Florida, Georgia and Alabama who have been denied bond hearings under the Trump policy, the ruling means one is now legally owed.