A federal appeals court has upheld a ruling declaring that the Trump administration is unlawfully jailing and denying bond hearings to thousands of people arrested by ICE in New England.
The ruling affirms that no administration is above the law. The government cannot indefinitely jail people and deny them the opportunity to seek their freedom at a bond hearing before a judge.
But the Trump administration has been doing just that.
For nearly 30 years, the federal government and courts understood that people arrested by immigration authorities inside the United States were generally eligible for a bond hearing – just as the plain language of federal law states. At a bond hearing, an immigration judge can determine whether someone should remain detained or be released while their immigration case proceeds.
People can be released on bond because these immigration cases are civil, not criminal. The Supreme Court has explained that civil detention cannot be imposed as a punishment, and that only two non-punitive rationales generally justify jailing someone over a civil matter:
- Ensuring that someone who is a flight risk is present at court appearances or present for removal from the country
- Protecting the community from legitimate threats to public safety
However, the Trump administration abruptly and unlawfully reversed course in July 2025. It wrongly stated that federal immigration law requires people who initially enter the country without inspection to be in mandatory detention, stripping them of their due process right to seek bond in front of a judge. That meant that people who had lived in the United States for years could suddenly be detained by ICE without any chance for release.
The government’s cruel mandatory detention policy stripped people of the chance to seek their freedom while indefinitely separating them from their loved ones, communities, and jobs. The policy also upended decades of standard civil immigration procedures, violating the clear language of federal law.
Back in September 2025, the ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, ACLU of New Hampshire, and other partners filed this class-action lawsuit on behalf of Jose Arnulfo Guerrero Orellana and others held without bond in New England detention centers.
Mr. Guerrero Orellana, like many others in the case, had lived in the United States for more than a decade when he was detained without the opportunity for a bond hearing. In October 2025, we won a court order requiring the government to give him a bond hearing, and he was later released on bond. The court also certified a class of people in New England who had been similarly denied bond hearings. Two months later, the court ruled that the Trump administration’s interpretation of federal immigration law was unlawful. The government appealed to the First Circuit in January 2026.
Now, the federal appeals court has affirmed our victory and the fundamental principle that all people in the United States, including immigrants, are entitled to due process.
With this ruling, seven appellate courts and hundreds of district court judges have now found that the Trump administration is acting unlawfully and violating immigrants' rights.
The federal immigration court in Boston has jurisdiction over immigration cases in Maine. Therefore, the case was initially filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which has jurisdiction over the immigration court. The government then appealed our district court victory to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico.
