‘A slight-of-hand trick’: Donald Trump’s sudden no-bail policy sparks ‘catastrophic’ lawsuits

The Trump administration has made a major change to immigration policy, now requiring people in the U.S. without legal status, who are arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to stay in detention while their deportation cases move forward. This is a sudden break from a long-standing practice that allowed non-citizens who were not considered a flight risk or a danger to public safety to be released on bail while their cases were being heard in immigration court.

According to NPR, the new rule was sent to all ICE employees in an email on July 8. The agency claims it is using its “very broad” authority to reinterpret current law. As a result, even people who have lived and worked in the U.S. for many years, with strong ties to their communities, are now being held under the same detention rules as those who were recently caught entering the country illegally.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the policy is meant to strengthen national security by closing “loopholes” that previously allowed “millions of unvetted illegal immigrants” to be released into communities. Immigrant rights advocates have filed a class-action lawsuit in a California federal court to try to stop the policy.

Trump’s newest policy is hit with plenty of lawsuits over the rule of law

Matt Adams, legal director for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, one of the groups involved in the lawsuit, says the policy misreads the law. He argues that it is already causing “catastrophic” and “irreparable harm,” and that current laws clearly give people the right to a bond hearing and that the agencies are trying to change the law through a “harsh interpretation.”

The lawsuit names top Trump administration officials, including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, and specifically focuses on the immigration court in Adelanto, California, where bond hearings are now reportedly being denied under the new policy. Adams calls the policy change “random and unreasonable” and says it violates immigrants’ rights to due process.

Immigration lawyers say the new policy is causing “disastrous” and “permanent harm” to possibly tens of thousands of non-citizens and their families. People in detention could be held for months or even years before their cases are decided.

Examples in the class-action lawsuit include Ana Franco Galdamez, a single mother who has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, is the only provider for her two U.S. citizen children, and recently finished breast cancer treatment. Since being arrested in a Los Angeles immigration raid, she has missed an important follow-up mammogram.

There is also the issue that many are US citizens detained without the ability to speak to lawyers. The lack of respect for law and the incompetence involved in losing inmates and lying to families makes it hard to think this change is a good idea.

Immigration lawyers were shocked by the sudden nationwide policy change in July, often finding out about it when bond requests that had been approved for decades were suddenly denied. Nico Thompson-Lleras, a defense attorney with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, said his experience was “It was almost like a slight-of-hand trick,” explaining that a client who would have easily gotten bond in the past was denied without even having a hearing.