The Supreme Court said on Thursday, October 1, 2026, that it will decide whether the federal government may hold immigrants arrested inside the United States in detention for the length of their deportation case, with no hearing at which a judge could set bond.
The case reaches the justices in the name of a Brazilian. Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha had lived in the United States for more than ten years when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him in Massachusetts in 2025. He asked for a bond hearing. The government said he was not entitled to one.
What the rule changed
In July 2025, ICE told its officers to treat everyone in deportation proceedings who had entered the country without being formally admitted as an "applicant for admission" — the legal category used for a person presenting themselves at a port of entry. The statute says such a person "shall be detained."
The practical effect is the part that matters. Until then, someone picked up far from the border, after years of living and working in the country, was generally processed under a separate provision that allows an immigration judge to weigh flight risk and danger and to set bond. Under the 2025 guidance, that hearing disappears, no matter how long the person has been in the country, and including people who were paroled in.
Lower courts have not accepted it quietly. According to SCOTUSblog's account of the filings, federal district judges have ruled against the guidance more than 9,300 times.
A five-circuit split
The Second Circuit ruled for Barbosa da Cunha and ordered that he get a bond hearing, joining the Sixth and the Eleventh. The Fifth and the Eighth went the other way and upheld mandatory detention for people accused of entering or remaining without authorisation.
That divide is what the government pointed to in asking the Court to step in, calling the result an unworkable patchwork of inconsistent immigration enforcement. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Barbosa da Cunha, argues the administration is stretching a border rule to cover arrests anywhere in the country.
The case is docketed as Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, No. 26-104. SCOTUSblog expects argument in early 2027, which would put a decision before the term ends in June.
What is at stake in numbers
The ACLU has told the Court that millions of noncitizens could fall within the policy's reach. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration policy analyst, put the consequence this way to Courthouse News Service: a government win "would greenlight long-term mass civil detention at a level not seen since Japanese internment during WWII."
For Brazilian readers the case is not abstract. Brazilians are one of the larger groups of recent arrivals without permanent status in the United States, and the question the Court has now agreed to answer — whether a decade of residence buys you a hearing before a judge, or nothing at all — applies to all of them equally.
The same day, the justices also agreed to hear a religious-zoning dispute from Kentucky and a North Dakota case on veterans' retirement pay in divorce settlements.
Reporting from SCOTUSblog, Courthouse News Service, PBS NewsHour and the Supreme Court's order list of October 1, 2026.
