The United States Department of Homeland Security has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case of Jaciel Cirrus Rojas, a Mexican national arrested by immigration agents in Racine, Wisconsin, last year — a petition that could decide whether tens of thousands of immigrants held in federal detention across the country are entitled to ask a judge for release on bond while their deportation cases are heard. Federal authorities filed the petition on Wednesday, Wisconsin Watch reported on Sunday, November 1, in the latest escalation of the legal fight over the Trump administration's mandatory detention policy.
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
Cirrus Rojas was not the person agents came for. In June 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents turned up at the apartment where the then-24-year-old lived, looking for a prior tenant, Wisconsin Watch reported. They arrested Cirrus Rojas instead, as what agents call a “collateral” arrest. He had entered the United States in 2018 without a visa, and Wisconsin court records show no criminal convictions under his name.
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
The policy that changed in July 2025
The legal argument turns on a 1996 law, the Immigration Reform Act, which requires immigration authorities to detain — without bond — anyone found crossing the U.S. border without authorization. For decades, administrations applied that rule narrowly: people arrested at the border were held without bond, while many people arrested inside the country could ask an immigration judge for a bond hearing and, if the judge agreed, pay bond and live at home while their case moved through court.
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
The Trump administration changed that reading in July 2025, when ICE Director Todd Lyons issued a new legal interpretation requiring detention without bond regardless of where an immigrant is arrested — at the border or years later inside the country. The Board of Immigration Appeals, the panel that sets rules for the federal immigration court system, later signed off on the interpretation. Cirrus Rojas spent most of the next nine months in custody at the Dodge County Detention Center in Juneau, Wisconsin, under that policy.
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
Why habeas corpus became the backup door
With bond hearings off the table, tens of thousands of immigrants in ICE custody turned to a backup option: habeas corpus petitions filed in federal district courts, which belong to the independent judicial branch rather than to the Justice Department that runs the immigration courts. When a district court grants such a petition, it generally orders an immigration judge to hold the bond hearing the policy had denied. Wisconsin's Western and Eastern District courts alone have received more than 100 such petitions over the past year, Wisconsin Watch reported.
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
The Seventh Circuit said no — by 2 to 1
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, ruled 2-1 in Cirrus Rojas's favour in July, joining appellate courts based in New York, Cincinnati, Denver, Atlanta and San Francisco that have rejected the administration's policy. “If Congress had indeed demanded — but not funded — no-bond detention for all unlawful entrants, that may well have thrown the nation's immigration system into chaos,” Judge Joshua Kolar, appointed by President Joe Biden, wrote for the majority. “Immigration authorities might have found themselves quickly overwhelmed by a colossal unfunded mandate to arrest and detain millions.” Judge Diane Sykes, appointed by President George W. Bush, dissented alone — and predicted this exact step: “At this point, only the Supreme Court can bring uniformity and settle this question once and for all,” she wrote. “I anticipate that it will do so soon.”
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
A bond hearing does not decide whether a person can stay in the United States, and winning one does not cancel a deportation case. It decides only whether the person waits for that case in a detention centre or at home, after paying bond and accepting conditions. A ruling against the mandatory detention policy would let thousands of detainees request such hearings; it would not require immigration judges to grant their requests.
He is out of custody — but the government says it can detain him again
Cirrus Rojas left custody earlier this year after a federal district court judge in California vacated the mandatory detention rule; the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit stayed that decision less than a month later. The Seventh Circuit allowed his case to move forward because federal authorities plan to re-detain him. “Nothing, absent our intervention, stops the government from making good on its promise,” Judge Kolar wrote. His Wisconsin attorney, Jenifer Bizzotto, framed the question now before the justices this way: “The question of mandatory detention thus boils down to one question: Can we lock up noncitizens without giving them a day in court first? The stakes could hardly be higher.”
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
A second mandatory-detention case is already on the court's desk
The Supreme Court has already agreed, earlier this month, to take up another mandatory detention dispute — the case of a Brazilian national arrested during a traffic stop in Massachusetts last September. The Department of Homeland Security has asked the justices to hold the Cirrus Rojas case until they decide the Massachusetts case, rather than hear it separately right away. Bizzotto said both cases “offer the Supreme Court the opportunity to affirm that the Constitution means what it says.” Separately this week, the court also quietly declined to revive a Biden-era policy that allowed immigration judges to pause deportation proceedings for immigrants seeking humanitarian visas or other forms of legal status.
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
Why this matters far beyond Racine
The fight is over arrests made inside the country, not at the border — in apartments, at traffic stops and at workplaces, in cities like Racine, about 30 miles south of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan. For immigrant families, including the Punjabi and other South Asian communities spread across Wisconsin, Illinois and the wider Midwest, the difference between the two policies is measured in months: under the old reading, a person arrested in the interior could ask a judge for bond within days; under the July 2025 reading, the same person can be held for the length of a deportation case with no bond hearing at all, unless a federal court intervenes on habeas. That is why a single Racine arrest has drawn petitions and rulings from courts in six circuits.
Source: Wisconsin Watch, via The Bug, Nov 1, 2026
What happens next
The justices will first decide what to do with the petition itself: hold it pending the Massachusetts case, as the Department of Homeland Security has asked, or take the Wisconsin case up as well. Either way, the mandatory detention question is now set to be answered at the highest level, and the answer will bind every circuit — including the ones that have so far rejected the policy and any that have upheld it. Until then, detainees' access to bond hearings continues to depend on which federal court district they are held in, and habeas petitions like the 100-plus already filed in Wisconsin remain the only open door. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when the court acts on the petition.