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President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign seemed to hit a horrifying crescendo in the last month, with chaos in the streets of Minneapolis stretching the city’s populace to a near-breaking point. Unfortunately, the situation is about to get worse. On Friday, two far-right judges greenlit the Trump administration’s radical reinterpretation of federal law that would sweep millions more immigrants into mandatory detention, potentially expanding the mass deportation machinery in new and horrifying ways. Their 2–1 decision for the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would transform the entire United States into a permanent border zone where unauthorized immigrants can be jailed indefinitely without bond, even years after they arrived. It supercharges the administration’s push to build an archipelago of mass detention centers larger than any existing jail or prison in the country. These mega-warehouses—which are not designed for human habitation—will hold up to 10,000 immigrants each, with little oversight and little recourse for detainees whose rights are violated. Even as public outrage over Trump’s mass deportation campaign intensifies, the legal and physical infrastructure of the plan are rapidly falling into place.

The 5th Circuit’s Friday decision gives new legal muscle to the Stephen Miller–orchestrated mass deportation campaign by endorsing the administration’s audacious rereading of a 1996 immigration law governing the detention of unauthorized migrants. For nearly 30 years, both the executive branch and the federal judiciary have understood this statute to draw a sharp line between migrants “seeking admission” at the border and those already in the country. The former are subject to mandatory detention without bond (with a few narrow exceptions). The latter, by contrast, can seek release on bond. If that request is denied, they can demand a bond hearing before an immigration judge. Most of the roughly 11 million immigrants without permanent legal status in the U.S. today fall into this second, bond-eligible group.

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