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Federal immigration authorities asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to hear the case of a Mexican national whom agents arrested last year in Racine. The petition is the latest escalation in a legal fight over the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy for immigrants facing deportation.
The justices’ decision will determine whether tens of thousands of immigrants currently in federal detention can seek release on bond.
“The question of mandatory detention thus boils down to one question: Can we lock up noncitizens without giving them a day in court first?” said Jenifer Bizzotto, the Wisconsin attorney representing Jaciel Cirrus Rojas, the man at the center of the case. “The stakes could hardly be higher.”
Arrested as ‘collateral’
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned up at then-24-year-old Cirrus Rojas’ apartment in June 2025 in search of a prior tenant. They instead arrested Cirrus Rojas, who entered the U.S. in 2018 without a visa, as “collateral.” Wisconsin court records show no criminal convictions under his name.
He spent most of the next nine months in custody at the Dodge County Detention Center in Juneau, entangled in a new White House policy barring ICE detainees from posting bond — a departure from decades of precedent.
The 1996 Immigration Reform Act requires immigration authorities to detain — without bond — anyone found crossing the U.S. border without authorization. Prior administrations applied that rule narrowly, allowing many immigrants arrested in the country’s interior to seek a bond hearing in immigration court.
The Trump administration bucked that approach in July 2025, when ICE Director Todd Lyons issued a new legal interpretation requiring detention without bond regardless of where immigrants are arrested.
The Board of Immigration Appeals, a panel of judges who set the rules for the federal immigration court system, later signed off on the interpretation.
With bond off the table, tens of thousands of immigrants in ICE custody turned to a backup option: filing habeas corpus petitions in federal district courts to challenge their detention.
Unlike immigration courts, which are part of the U.S. Department of Justice, federal district courts belong to the judicial branch and, therefore, are technically independent of the White House. When a federal district court grants a habeas petition, it generally orders an immigration court judge to hold a bond hearing.
Wisconsin’s Western and Eastern District courts have received more than 100 habeas petitions over the past year.
A federal appeals court split
The 7th Circuit ruled 2-1 in Cirrus Rojas’ favor in July, joining appellate courts based in New York, Cincinnati, Denver, Atlanta and San Francisco in rejecting the 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, whom Joe Biden appointed to the court, wrote in the court’s majority opinion. “Immigration authorities might have found themselves quickly overwhelmed by a colossal unfunded mandate to arrest and detain millions.” Judge Diane Sykes, a George W. Bush appointee, dissented alone.
“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.”
Cirrus Rojas left custody earlier this year after a federal district court judge in California vacated the mandatory detention rule. The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed that decision less than a month later.
The 7th Circuit allowed his case to move forward because federal authorities plan to re-detain him.
Supreme Court could have final say
“Nothing, absent our intervention, stops the government from making good on its promise,” Kolar wrote.The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, is now asking the Supreme Court to step in.
The court agreed to take up another mandatory detention dispute earlier this month. That case involves a Brazilian national arrested during a traffic stop in Massachusetts last September.
DHS asked the justices to hold Cirrus Rojas’ case until they decide the Massachusetts case.
In Bizzotto’s view, both cases “offer the Supreme Court the opportunity to affirm that the Constitution means what it says.”
A ruling against the mandatory detention policy would open the door for thousands of ICE detainees — at least those within circuits that side with the Trump administration — to request bond hearings in immigration court. It would not require immigration court judges to grant their bond requests.
The Supreme Court also quietly declined this week to revive a Biden-era policy that allowed immigration court judges to pause deportation proceedings for immigrants seeking humanitarian visas or other forms of legal status.
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Wisconsin ICE arrestee’s case heads to US Supreme Court is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
