(UNITED STATES) – The Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether people in prolonged ICE detention have a constitutional right to a bond hearing after months in custody, returning to a question the justices left unresolved in an earlier immigration detention case.

The petition centers on the gap left by Jennings v. Rodriguez, where the court held that the immigration statute itself does not require automatic bond hearings for detained immigrants. The justices did not answer the separate constitutional question: whether holding people for extended periods without a hearing violates the Fifth Amendment.

That unresolved issue has remained at the center of detention litigation because the court’s statutory rulings cut off one route to release while leaving individual due-process claims alive. The latest appeal asks the justices to say whether the Constitution itself requires a hearing once custody stretches on for months.

In Jennings v. Rodriguez, the Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that the Immigration and Nationality Act does not grant detained immigrants periodic bond hearings while their cases are pending. The court sent the case back so lower courts could address the constitutional claim instead.

Before that ruling, the Ninth Circuit had said detention lasting beyond six months became “constitutionally suspect” and required individualized bond hearings for people held under mandatory detention rules. That approach treated time in custody as a trigger for closer review by a judge.

The federal government took a broader view of its detention authority. It argued that it needed power to keep noncitizens in custody while removal proceedings continued, including some lawful permanent residents and asylum seekers.

The dispute reaches beyond one statute because immigration detention can last long after an arrest and often longer than many criminal pretrial detentions. A bond hearing, if ordered, does not guarantee release; it gives a detainee a chance to argue for release before an immigration judge or another decision-maker.

The constitutional claim has mattered more as later Supreme Court rulings narrowed the statutory path detainees had used in class actions. Those decisions did not shut the courthouse door completely, but they made broad court orders much harder to obtain.

On June 13, 2022, the court ruled in Garland v. Gonzalez that federal courts could not order classwide injunctive relief under the relevant immigration statute for people seeking release from prolonged detention. That decision stripped lower courts of a tool they had used to require bond hearing procedures for groups of detainees at once.

That same day, the court ruled in Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez that the statute at issue did not require a bond hearing after six months of post-removal-order detention. Together, the two rulings left room for individual constitutional challenges while closing the classwide statutory path.

Those holdings reshaped the detention fights that followed. Lawyers challenging lengthy detention now must press the Fifth Amendment question more directly, often person by person, instead of relying on a court’s reading of the statute to secure hearings for a broader class.

Current policy debates show why the issue has not faded. A 2024 policy brief said ICE has detained some noncitizens for months even after they won immigration relief, describing one Virginia example with an average of three months of continued detention after a final grant of withholding of removal or Convention Against Torture relief.

That brief also said ICE policy instructs field offices to release people “as soon as they are granted relief” unless “exceptional circumstances” justify continued detention. The gap between that instruction and actual time in custody has fed arguments that judicial review is needed when detention drags on.

The issue is especially sharp in cases where a person has already secured some protection from removal but remains confined while paperwork, review, or release decisions continue. In those cases, advocates argue, detention starts to look less like a step tied to active removal and more like custody without a prompt chance to challenge it.

Government lawyers have long argued that detention serves practical and legal purposes during removal proceedings, including ensuring that noncitizens appear for hearings and can be removed if they lose. That argument has covered several categories of detainees, not just recent border crossers, and has included some lawful permanent residents and asylum seekers.

The Supreme Court’s past opinions have turned heavily on statutory text, asking what Congress authorized and what lower courts may order. The new petition places the focus back on due process, asking whether the Constitution imposes a limit when detention becomes prolonged and no bond hearing has taken place.

That question has remained unsettled since Jennings. The justices rejected the view that judges could read an automatic hearing requirement into the statute, but they did not decide whether the Fifth Amendment requires one as a matter of constitutional law after an extended period in custody.

Lower courts have wrestled with that opening in different ways, particularly after the Supreme Court closed the classwide route in Garland and rejected a six-month statutory hearing rule in Arteaga-Martinez. The result has been a patchwork of individual challenges in which the length of detention, the legal basis for custody, and the person’s immigration posture all matter.

The petition now before the court asks the justices to provide a clearer answer. A ruling recognizing a constitutional right to a bond hearing in prolonged ICE detention would not erase the government’s detention power, but it would require a hearing at some point after months in custody.

A ruling the other way would leave detainees to contest their confinement through narrower case-by-case claims without a constitutional hearing rule attached to the passage of time. That would preserve the government position that detention can continue during removal proceedings unless Congress says otherwise or a court finds a violation in an individual case.

The court has not yet resolved where that constitutional line falls. Until it does, prolonged ICE detention, the reach of a bond hearing, and the limits of the Fifth Amendment will remain at the center of one of the judiciary’s longest-running immigration disputes.