On July 30, two federal appeals courts — the Seventh and Ninth Circuits, ruling the same day — rejected the government's position that anyone who entered the United States without inspection is subject to mandatory detention, no matter how long they have lived here. Bond hearings were standard practice for this population for roughly three decades until the administration ended them in 2025. In the circuits that have now pushed back, they are back: a detained client can ask the immigration judge for bond instead of racing to federal district court with a habeas petition.
What changed
The dispute traces to September 2025, when the Board of Immigration Appeals held in Matter of Yajure Hurtadothat people present in the U.S. without admission are “applicants for admission” detained under INA § 235(b) — the border provision, which carries no bond hearing — rather than § 236(a), the interior-arrest provision immigration judges had used to set bond for decades. Under that reading, immigration judges lost bond jurisdiction over this population entirely. The only path out of detention was a habeas corpus petition in federal district court.
The Seventh Circuit's decision in Rojas v. Olson dismantles that reading for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. The petitioner had lived in the U.S. since 2018; when DHS arrested him in June 2025, an immigration judge found him neither a danger nor a flight risk and ordered him released on bond. DHS refused to release him, invoking the border provision instead. Writing for a 2-1 panel, Judge Kolar rejected the government's theory that a person “deemed” an applicant for admission is thereby “seeking admission” — “legal fictions are just that—fictions” — and stated the holding plainly:
Aliens present in the country without admission and not “seeking admission” fall under Section 1226, not Section 1225(b)(2)(A), and are eligible for bond hearings subject to the INA's other requirements.
The same day, a divided Ninth Circuit panel reached the same conclusion in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. The circuit scoreboard now stands at five to two: the Second, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have rejected the mandatory-detention interpretation; the Fifth and Eighth have upheld it. Three certiorari petitions on the question are already pending at the Supreme Court, and the Rojas dissent urges the Court to take it up.
What attorneys are saying
Kaur Law (@kaurlaw) put the whole decision in three words — and then the practice point, which is about where you file:
Seventh Circuit recently issued a decision where bonds are back. … You can apply for a bond instead of filing habeas.
@attorneymartinez (@attorneymartinez), posting under the caption “In the 9th circuit we trust,” framed the ruling as part of the larger pattern:
A decision was released last week that says that if you live in any of these states and if you enter the country illegally, meaning you did not enter legally with a visa, border crossing card, etc., you are eligible for a bond hearing if you are detained by ICE.
Now, not one or two, but five federal courts have literally disagreed with them and they're going to allow people to get bond hearings even if you enter the country illegally.
The habeas route these rulings displace was real, and firms were winning with it — at emergency speed. We wrote last week about the attorneys filing same-day habeas petitions for detained clients, including one whose federal release order came back within about a day of the arrest. That is the posture bond eligibility replaces: a bond motion before the immigration judge who already has the case is routine practice; a same-day federal filing is not something every detained client can get.
Why this matters
Geography now controls outcomes. The same client, with the same facts, is bond-eligible if detained in Chicago and subject to mandatory detention if detained in Dallas. Detention location — and transfers between facilities in different circuits — carry stakes they did not carry two years ago.
The limits matter just as much. Bond eligibilityis not bond: immigration judges still weigh danger and flight risk, and can deny or set high amounts. The Laken Riley Act's mandatory-detention categories for people charged with or convicted of certain offenses are untouched by these rulings. And the landscape is provisional — with a five-to-two split and cert petitions pending, the Supreme Court is likely to have the final word, and a decision the other way would close the window these rulings opened.
Where Lexfill fits
Habeas is not leaving the toolkit. In the Fifth and Eighth Circuits the policy stands, and everywhere else habeas remains the backstop for prolonged or defective detention. Lexfill's habeas corpus practice page shows how firms use it for exactly this work: one client intake, and Lex drafts the § 2241 petition — the filing that, until last week, was the only way to get a bond determination in these cases at all.
And for the bond motions themselves, the file still decides the outcome. An immigration judge weighing flight risk and danger reads the record you assemble — the years of presence, the family ties, the clean history. Lexfill reads every upload, extracts what matters, and flags the gaps and contradictions before the judge sees them.
What to do now
- Audit your detained docket by circuit. Clients held in the Second, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, or Eleventh Circuits who were denied bond on Yajure Hurtado grounds may now have a straightforward bond motion. File before the landscape shifts.
- Renew bond where it was denied for lack of jurisdiction.A prior denial that rested on § 1225(b)(2)(A) is exactly what these decisions reject.
- Keep habeas ready. It is still the only route in the Fifth and Eighth Circuits, and the backstop everywhere else.
- Track the cert petitions. A grant would put every bond obtained under these rulings on a clock.
- Screen for Laken Riley Act charges at intake — these rulings do not help clients within its mandatory-detention categories.
Every case differs, and the facts of an individual client's situation drive the analysis.