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The sneaky way Trump’s lawyers are supercharging ICE

A court just gave awful news to victims of ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis.

Shortly after President Donald Trump took office for the second time, his administration started illegally detaining immigrants without giving them a bond hearing or other method of avoiding incarceration while an immigration judge determines if they are in the country legally.

The overwhelming majority of federal judges have rejected this illegal practice. As Politico’s Kyle Cheney reported in February, “at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.”

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Unfortunately for the immigrants caught up in Trump’s dragnet, the minority of judges who support the administration’s mass detentions policy appear to be overrepresented on federal appeals courts, powerful bodies which can determine how federal law functions in multiple states. On Wednesday, a divided panel of the the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, whose jurisdiction includes Minnesota, embraced the minority position and called for mandatory detention.

That means that, unless the Eighth Circuit’s decision is reversed on appeal, immigrants arrested during Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis just lost the most effective........

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