Legal expert slams appeals court ruling on Trump detention plan: 'Awful news'

In a Friday night ruling, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Trump administration’s controversial policy to detain nearly all individuals facing deportation without bond, even if they have no criminal record and have lived in the U.S. for decades.

The decision, handed down by a divided three-judge panel, reverses three decades of federal precedent and contradicts thousands of lower court rulings nationwide, Politico reported.

“That prior Administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority … does not mean they lacked the authority to do more,” Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee, wrote in the 2-1 majority opinion.

The ruling from the conservative New Orleans-based appeals court – a win for the MAGA administration – marks a stark break from the standard practice of allowing bond hearings for deportation cases, which has been upheld by the “vast majority” of judges across the country, according to the outlet.

“A POLITICO review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it, in about 130 cases,” the report said.

Despite the Friday night ruling, legal experts say the case is likely to end up in the Supreme Court, where Trump’s hand-picked conservative justices hold a supermajority.

But according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, the ruling is "AWFUL news for due process."

"This decision will wipe out the availability of release through bond for tens of thousands of people detained in or transported to Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi by ICE," he wrote Friday. "This decision overturns 30 years of interpretation of a law passed in 1996."