195. The Immigration Detention Flood
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Feres v. United States
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The article discusses Justice Thomas's criticism of the Feres doctrine and the Court's denial of certiorari in Beck v. United States. Understanding the original 1950 case that created this controversial doctrine barring military servicemembers from suing the government provides essential context for this ongoing legal debate.
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Immigration detention in the United States
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The article's central focus is on the Trump administration's expanded interpretation of mandatory detention policies. Wikipedia's article on immigration detention provides historical context, legal framework, and the evolution of detention practices that would deepen understanding of why 700+ judicial rulings have pushed back against these policies.
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Confrontation Clause
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The article discusses Pitts v. Mississippi, where the Supreme Court reversed a ruling based on Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause violations regarding child witness testimony. Understanding this constitutional provision and its jurisprudential history illuminates why case-specific determinations are required rather than categorical state rules.
Welcome back to “One First,” a (more-than) weekly newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court and related legal topics more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support—and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks:
Every Monday morning, I’ll be offering an update on goings-on at the Court (“On the Docket”); a longer introduction to some feature of the Court’s history, current issues, or key players (“The One First ‘Long Read’”); and some Court-related trivia. If you’re not already a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider becoming one—and upgrading to a paid subscription if your circumstances permit:
I wanted to use today’s “Long Read” to write about an issue that, at least in my universe, hasn’t gotten a lot of public attention—but that may well be one of the more quietly important legal stories of the year: The role federal district courts are playing in pushing back against a massively significant change to immigration detention policy that the Trump administration quietly attempted to implement back in July.
In a nutshell, the executive branch has radically expanded its interpretation of which non-citizens can be arrested and detained without bond pending their removal proceedings—a move that has exposed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of individuals already living inside the United States to immigration arrest and detention to which they would not realistically have been subject prior to this summer, and with no right to seek release once they’ve been arrested. Many of those arrests have taken place at ICE facilities or courthouses when these same individuals have appeared for regular check-ins or for the next steps in their asylum applications. But regardless of where these arrests are taking place, it’s safe to say that this quiet attempt to expand what’s often shorthanded, however inaccurately, as “mandatory detention” is directly connected to many of the arrests we’re seeing during ICE raids in U.S. cities.
The Trump administration’s new interpretation of a 29-year-old statute, in turn, has been rejected by a truly staggering array of federal district courts across the country. According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, since July,
At least 225 judges have ruled in more than 700 cases that the administration’s new policy, which also deprives people of an opportunity to seek release from an immigration court, is a likely
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