The Supreme Court just agreed to review a case called Genalo v. Black, and if you're wondering what it's about, here's the short version: Obama-appointed judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that criminal noncitizens — including a child sex abuser from Jamaica and a violent convict from the Dominican Republic — deserve bond hearings that could spring them from detention while they wait to be deported. The Trump administration said "absolutely not" and took it to the highest court in the land.
Somewhere, an ACLU lawyer is stress-eating.
The two men at the center of this case are both green card holders who were convicted of aggravated felonies. One of them, a Jamaican national, was held for 7 months in immigration custody. The other, a Dominican Republic citizen, sat for 21 months after an assault conviction. Neither received a hearing to determine whether they were a flight risk or should be released on bond. The 2nd Circuit ruled in 2024 that the due process clause of the Constitution requires such hearings for prolonged detention.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer called the lower court's decision "deeply flawed," arguing it prioritized the migrants' liberty interests over the government's authority to deport criminals. The Trump administration had appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court back in January, calling it "seriously misguided."
The ACLU is representing both criminal noncitizens. Their lawyers tried to convince the Supreme Court not to take up the case at all, arguing in an April brief that the Trump administration was advancing "an extreme theory" and that the disagreement among lower courts was little more than a "shallow split." They even pointed out that one of the detainees has already left the country and the other was released from detention, suggesting the case might be moot.
The Court didn't buy it. They granted review anyway.
This is what happens when Obama-era judicial activists get creative with the Constitution. Federal law mandates detention for noncitizens convicted of specified crimes. That's not ambiguous. But Obama-appointed judges on the 2nd Circuit decided that criminals awaiting deportation should get the same procedural courtesy as American citizens accused of jaywalking. Bond hearings. Flight risk assessments. The whole show.
Kenneth Genalo, the Director of the ICE field office in New York, is the named government petitioner in the case. The case centers on whether the government must prove that detained criminal noncitizens pose a flight risk or danger to the community using heightened evidentiary standards before it can keep them locked up pending removal.
This is example of the Supreme Court cleaning up yet another mess left by the Obama judiciary. Justice Samuel Alito authored a divided decision on a similar challenge back in 2016, concluding that federal law didn't mandate bond hearings — but the Court at that time didn't address the constitutional question after extended detention. Now they will.
The ACLU called these cases "strikingly poor vehicles." Translation: they know they're going to lose and they're already making excuses. When the people defending child sex abusers and violent felons start preemptively downplaying a case, that's how you know the good guys are about to win one.
