The Biggest Cases Coming in the Next Supreme Court Term: Next week the Supreme Court will return from its summer recess to hear a new term of cases. While the court is already slated to make rulings with far-reaching consequences, the most important decisions looming this term may not even be on its radar yet.
Earlier this week, the justices announced that they would take up what may be the most important case of the term. The Trump administration had asked the court to hear Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha to review lower court rulings against its mandatory-detention policy for undocumented immigrants. How the Supreme Court decides the case could have vast implications for the Trump administration’s ability to carry out mass deportations.
At issue in Rhoney is whether the federal government can indefinitely hold undocumented immigrants in custody while their deportation proceedings take place. Since at least the 1980s, immigration courts have routinely allowed them to post bond while they await the outcome of their cases. The Trump administration changed tack in July 2025, arguing that it could instead hold undocumented immigrants without bond.
To support this position, the administration cited a 1996 law known as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Everyone calls it IIRIRA instead. Under IIRIRA, the Justice Department has claimed that one provision in the law requires federal officials to detain undocumented immigrants who illegally crossed the U.S. border. That provision says that “an alien who is an applicant for admission” into the United States “shall be detained” if “the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.”
To that end, the Justice Department has invoked the IIRIRA provision to justify holding any undocumented immigrant in custody without bond hearings until their deportation hearings are concluded—or, importantly, until they “voluntarily” agree to leave the country. Since the Trump administration has detained tens of thousands of immigrants in squalid… https://newrepublic.com/article/216181/supreme-court-term-getting-underway