The successful campaign to make a terrifying Supreme Court immigration case disappear

If you felt a gust of wind late on Friday, it came from hundreds of immigration lawyers who simultaneously exhaled after the Supreme Court announced it would not hear a case known as Genalo v. And if the Court had decided this case, its recent immigration decisions suggest that most of the justices may have blessed indefinite detention. Now that the Supreme Court has removed the Black case from its own docket, this appeals court decision will not be formally repudiated by the Supreme Court. And the question of whether these immigrants can be detained forever will remain unresolved until the Supreme Court takes up another case involving a similarly situated immigrant. Both men at the heart of the Black case spent significant amounts of time in immigration detention facilities years after serving sentences for crimes. One, a Jamaican citizen named Carol Williams Black, spent seven months in an immigration detention facility. Among other things, the actual pardon document signed by Hochul specifically states that it will grant Guerrero Mariano “ relief from removal .” Guerrero Mariano’s lawyers had sought this pardon, and Hochul granted it mere days before his brief was due in the Supreme Court. It’s possible that the Supreme Court might have agreed with the lower court’s holding that immigrants who are detained for an “unreasonably prolonged period” have a constitutional right to a bond hearing — this Court has, on rare occasions , broken with the Trump administration in immigration cases. Kim (2003) that an immigrant similarly situated to Guerrero Mariano may “be detained for the brief period necessary for their removal proceedings.” Read together, these decisions suggest that the government does have some power to detain people while their immigration case is pending. In the best case, the Supreme Court may have reached the same conclusion as the Second Circuit — but even tha