Federal immigration authorities have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider Jaciel Cirrus Rojas’s case, which raises a question about bond access for people arrested inside the United States after entering without authorization. The Department of Homeland Security has also asked the justices to pause Rojas’s case while they consider a related dispute involving a Brazilian national arrested in Massachusetts, according to Wisconsin Watch.
The legal question reaches beyond one case
The dispute concerns a 1996 federal law that requires detention without bond for people found crossing the U.S. border without authorization. Earlier administrations generally applied that requirement to border cases, leaving many people arrested in the country’s interior able to seek bond hearings. In July 2025, ICE Director Todd Lyons adopted a broader interpretation requiring detention without bond regardless of where someone was arrested; the Board of Immigration Appeals later endorsed that view, Wisconsin Watch reported.
The justices have already agreed to review a separate mandatory-detention case, Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network reports that the court granted review on Oct. 1, 2026. The case asks whether federal immigration law requires detention during removal proceedings for people in the United States who have not been formally admitted.
Appeals courts have reached opposing conclusions about the detention policy. Courts based in New York, Cincinnati, Denver, Atlanta and San Francisco have rejected it, while the Eighth Circuit has joined the Fifth Circuit in upholding it, according to Bloomberg Law. Its analysis also counted more than 9,300 district-court rulings rejecting the government’s policy and three petitions pending at the Supreme Court.
Rojas’s appeal and custody status
The Seventh Circuit ruled 2-1 for Rojas on July 30, 2026, finding that he was not subject to mandatory detention and could receive a bond hearing. The ACLU of Wisconsin, which represented him, says the court reversed a district court’s denial of his habeas petition. Judge Joshua Kolar wrote for the majority; Judge Diane Sykes dissented. Wisconsin Watch reported that Sykes said the Supreme Court was needed to settle the issue uniformly.
Rojas’s case began with an ICE arrest at his Racine apartment in June 2025. Agents had gone there looking for a prior tenant, but arrested Rojas, a Mexican national who had entered the United States in 2018 without a visa, Wisconsin Watch reported. The outlet also reported that Wisconsin court records showed no criminal convictions under his name and that he spent nearly nine months in ICE custody at the Dodge County Detention Center in Juneau.
The available custody reports describe different points in time. In December 2025, the Wisconsin Examiner reported that Rojas remained in detention. Wisconsin Watch later reported that he had left custody earlier in 2026 after a California federal judge vacated the mandatory detention rule nationwide; the Ninth Circuit stayed that ruling less than a month later. Wisconsin Watch also reported that federal authorities planned to detain Rojas again, a development relevant to why the case remains active.
What a ruling could change
A decision against mandatory detention could let thousands of detainees in circuits that have upheld the policy ask for bond hearings, but it would not compel immigration judges to grant release, Wisconsin Watch reported. The legal dispute has also reached Wisconsin’s federal courts: the state’s Western and Eastern District courts received more than 100 habeas petitions over the past year from people challenging ICE detention, the outlet reported.
