A federal court on Friday ruled that the Trump administration has unlawfully denied bond hearings to potentially thousands of people in ICE detention in New England.
The ruling comes in a class-action lawsuit led by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine and several other groups.
ACLU attorney Max Brooks said until recently, bond hearings were standard procedure for most people arrested by ICE.
“They would have a chance to show that they’re not a danger to the community or a flight risk, and to be able to continue their removal proceedings with their families in their communities,” he said.
But that changed over the summer, he said, when the administration broke with a widely accepted understanding of federal law when it stopped allowing bond hearings in many cases.
“Totally departing from what everyone understood it to mean, and refusing to give those folks a bond hearing and keeping them in detention without any chance to show why they should be freed,” Brooks said.
The ruling, from a U.S. District Court judge in Massachusetts, follows a similar ruling from a federal judge in California.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
