WASHINGTON — More than 30 years in Washington. Married. Two children who are U.S. citizens. No claim from the government that he was dangerous or would flee. None of it bought Oscar Enrique Lopez Garcia so much as a hearing when ICE agents took him on his way to work last October.
On Thursday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that was illegal — and warned that the Trump administration’s reading of immigration law would mean Congress had quietly ordered “the single largest mass detention of human beings in our nation’s history.”
The 2-1 decision in Lopez Garcia v. Guadian is the administration’s ninth consecutive loss in the federal appeals courts since the 8th Circuit sided with it in March. It also completes the map. All 11 numbered circuits have now answered whether ICE can jail longtime residents without bond simply because they entered the country without inspection, however long ago. Nine said no. Two said yes.
In Houston, the answer is no. In Baltimore, it is yes. Until the Supreme Court settles it, geography is due process.
‘We decline to do so’
Judge Nicole Berner, a Biden appointee, wrote for the majority, joined by Senior Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, an Obama appointee. The court held that Section 1226(a) — the law that lets an immigration judge weigh release on bond — governs people who have lived inside the country for years. Section 1225(b)(2)(A), the mandatory-detention provision, is for people arriving at the border.
For nearly three decades, the court noted, all three branches of the federal government read the law that way. Then, on July 8, 2025, ICE issued interim guidance flipping it, and the Board of Immigration Appeals adopted the new reading in Matter of Yajure Hurtado. By the majority’s count, federal trial courts have since sided with detainees in more than 20,000 individual cases.
The government conceded that its theory would have made roughly 2 million people subject to mandatory detention when the law passed in 1996. The estimate today is 6 million. The court found no sign Congress meant any of it. Congress “does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouseholes,” the majority wrote — borrowing a line from the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a detail aimed squarely at the six conservatives across First Street from the Capitol.
The majority called the dispute “a textbook case for constitutional avoidance,” the principle that courts should not read an ambiguous law in a way that tramples the Fifth Amendment due process rights of millions of people living and working in the United States.
Then Berner reached back. “Mass detention of marginalized individuals without due process harkens back to some of the darkest moments in our country’s history,” she wrote, citing the 1892 Geary Act’s detention of Chinese immigrants and the internment of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. Those detentions, she wrote, “were limited in scope in comparison to the mandatory detention that the Government urges us today to find that Congress established thirty years ago in an ambiguously worded statutory provision.”
“We decline to do so.”
The men in the case
Lopez Garcia came to the United States from Guatemala as a child in 1996. Juan Jose Rivera left El Salvador in 2005, at 26, and has lived and worked here for two decades. He has never been arrested or charged with a crime. ICE picked him up near his Washington home on Oct. 2, 2025 — one week before agents took Lopez Garcia.
Both men were held at the Caroline Detention Facility in Virginia without a bond hearing. The government never argued either was a danger or a flight risk. Had either man been detained just four months earlier, the court wrote, “he would have been provided a bond hearing before an immigration judge.”
U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in Alexandria ordered those hearings on Nov. 14, 2025. Immigration judges found neither man dangerous nor likely to flee. Both walked out on bond that month.
The dissent
Judge Allison Jones Rushing, a Trump appointee, argued the text is plain: anyone in the country without lawful admission is an “applicant for admission” who must be held. Thirty years of the government doing otherwise, she wrote, “tells us nothing about the meaning” of the mandatory-detention statute. She would have denied both men’s petitions.
The fine print
The win is a hearing, not a release. The 4th Circuit corrected the trial judge on one point: at a bond hearing, it is the detained person — not the government — who must prove he is neither dangerous nor a flight risk.
Next up: the Supreme Court
The Justice Department is not waiting. In late June, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to take up the administration’s 6th Circuit loss and uphold the policy nationwide. The court has separately agreed to hear Genalo v. Black, which asks whether people held under the criminal-offense mandatory-detention provision are constitutionally owed a bond hearing once their detention becomes unreasonably prolonged. The justices open their new term Oct. 5.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia filed in support of Lopez Garcia and Rivera, including Virginia and Maryland. The ACLU argued the case for the two men.
In the 10 states covered by the 5th and 8th Circuits — Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi; Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota — the law still says no. Nine justices will decide which answer the whole country lives under.
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I’m confused as to why it’s still ‘yes’ in Baltimore? Can anyone explain?