WASHINGTON | The Supreme Court of the United States is examining Tuesday the detention of certain immigrants for several months, a subject which places the administration of Democrat Joe Biden in difficulty with the defenders of migrants.
• Read also: Texas is building its own ‘wall’ on the border with Mexico
• Read also: United States: abandonment of negotiations to compensate separated migrant families
The high court will examine two separate cases concerning Mexicans who entered the United States illegally, arrested and detained pending deportation.
Citing security risks, including threats of torture from police or armed gangs, they asked not to be sent back to their country.
After several months without a response, they demanded the right to see a migration judge to obtain bail, which they were refused.
They then went to court. After several stages, two separate federal appeals courts ruled in 2019 that after six months of detention, these immigrants were entitled to such a hearing.
Donald Trump’s government, which had made the fight against illegal immigration a marker of its presidency, had however asked the Supreme Court to invalidate these decisions.
In 2021, Democrat Joe Biden’s administration continued that fight. The appeals courts “were wrong” because nothing in the law “referred to a six-month limit, to bail hearings or to immigration judges”, pleaded his representative in an argument transmitted at the High Court.
This position, while Joe Biden has promised to make the migration system more humane, is strongly criticized by associations for the defense of migrants.
“The case asks a simple question: can the federal government lock up migrants for months or even years without a hearing to see if their continued detention is justified. And the Biden administration is decidedly on the wrong side in this battle,” the ACLU criticized.
Denying bail can have “deadly consequences…especially during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the powerful human rights organization added in a statement.
In the United States, the law normally sets the deadline for applying an eviction order at 90 days, but authorizes in certain cases to go beyond. In fiscal year 2021, the average length of detention for migrants was 45.7 days, according to official statistics.
–
