Introduction

On March 25, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit issued its decision in Herrera Avila v. Bondi, No. 25-3248 (8th Cir. Mar. 25, 2026), a ruling that significantly expands the federal government’s authority to detain undocumented immigrants without bond. At issue was whether 8 U.S.C. §1225(b)(2)(A)—a provision that every presidential administration since 1996 had treated as a tool of border enforcement—could be applied to immigrants already living inside the United States who entered without inspection years, or even decades, earlier. The Eighth Circuit said yes.1

The decision is important not just for what it holds, but for the world it describes. For nearly thirty years—across five consecutive presidential administrations—the federal government detained people under §1225(b)(2)(A) only at or near the border. Immigrants who had made their lives in the American interior, whatever the circumstances of their entry, were eligible for individualized bond hearings under 8 U.S.C. §1226(a), at which an immigration judge could weigh their individual situation: their family ties, their employment, their record, their risk of flight. That framework is now gone in the Eighth Circuit, and under the logic of Herrera Avila and the Fifth Circuit’s earlier decision in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, 166 F.4th 494 (5th Cir. 2026), it may well disappear in more circuits before long. At stake, ultimately, is the liberty of millions of people.2

This article examines Herrera Avila in detail. It begins with the statutory framework that gave rise to the case and traces the history that shaped competing interpretations of the statute. It then reviews the facts, the district court’s decision, and the Eighth Circuit’s majority and dissenting opinions. It surveys the developing circuit landscape, notes the constitutional questions that have survived the statutory ruling, and closes with practical implications—for the immigration system generally and for undocumented immigrants and their counsel specifically.

The Statutory Framework

To understand Herrera Avila, it helps to understand the history that preceded it. Before Congress enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996, immigration law maintained a sharp formal distinction between two categories of noncitizens and the proceedings that governed them. Noncitizens who arrived at a port of entry and presented themselves to authorities were placed in “exclusion proceedings” and subject to mandatory detention while their cases were decided. Noncitizens who entered the country without any inspection—who crossed the border outside a checkpoint—were placed in “deportation proceedings” and were ordinarily eligible for release on bond. This created a situation that many in Congress regarded as perverse: someone who tried to enter through legal channels faced harsher procedural treatment than someone who evaded inspection entirely.3

The IIRIRA addressed this disparity by replacing the dual exclusion-deportation framework with a single “removal” proceeding applicable to all noncitizens. The mechanism for this unification was 8 U.S.C. §1225(a)(1), which provides that “[a]n alien present in the United States who has not been admitted or who arrives in the United States . . . shall be deemed for purposes of this chapter an applicant for admission.” Under immigration law, “admitted” carries a specific technical meaning: it signifies a “lawful entry of the alien into the United States after inspection and authorization by an immigration officer.” 8 U.S.C. §1101(a)(13)(A). A noncitizen who entered without inspection has never been “admitted” regardless of how long they have been in the country, and is therefore an “applicant for admission” under the statute’s definitions.

Once the “applicant for admission” classification is established, 8 U.S.C. §1225(b)(2)(A) governs detention. That provision reads: “[I]n the case of an alien who is an applicant for admission, if the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted, the alien shall be detained for a proceeding under section 1229a of this title.” The phrase “applicant for admission” is a statutory term of art defined by §1225(a)(1). The phrase “seeking admission,” however, appears in the detention trigger clause without a separate statutory definition. See 8 U.S.C. §1225(b)(2)(A).

Whether these two phrases mean the same thing—or whether “seeking admission” requires something more, some affirmative act toward formal entry—is the interpretive question at the heart of Herrera Avila. If they are equivalent, then any noncitizen who entered without inspection is subject to mandatory detention without bond when removal proceedings are initiated, no matter how long ago they entered and no matter where in the country they are apprehended. If “seeking admission” requires something additional—a present-tense, active effort to gain lawful entry—then noncitizens like Herrera Avila, who entered long ago and took no further steps to regularize their status, fall outside the mandatory detention provision and are entitled to individualized bond hearings under 8 U.S.C. §1226(a).4

The stakes of the interpretive question go beyond the individual case. The undocumented population of the United States numbers in the millions. If §1225(b)(2)(A) applies to all of them, the government can detain without a bond hearing any one of them upon apprehension, anywhere in the country. The individual bond hearing—the mechanism by which an immigration judge weighs flight risk, community ties, employment, family circumstances, and danger to the community—becomes unavailable. The only release valve in the statute is the narrow parole authority under 8 U.S.C. §1182(d)(5)(A), which is limited by regulation and administrative policy to case-by-case releases for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. That safety valve offers little meaningful relief for most people.5

Facts and Procedural History

Joaquin Herrera Avila is a native and citizen of Mexico. He first entered the United States without inspection in 2006, and entered again without inspection in 2016. He settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Aside from a single DUI, the dissenting judge noted that he had been “living a law-abiding life” in the United States for nearly twenty years.

On August 29, 2025, Department of Homeland Security officers stopped Herrera Avila during a traffic stop on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis. He admitted to the officers that he had entered the country illegally and lacked documents authorizing his presence. He was arrested that day, and DHS issued a Notice to Appear charging him with removability under 8 U.S.C. §1182(a)(6)(A)(i) and (a)(7)(A)(i)(I)—the provisions governing aliens present without admission and aliens lacking valid entry documentation. DHS detained him without bond pending removal proceedings.

Herrera Avila requested a bond redetermination hearing before an immigration judge. The immigration judge denied the request. He then filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota under 28 U.S.C. §2241, seeking either immediate release or an order directing the government to conduct a bond hearing under 8 U.S.C. §1226(a).

The district court granted the petition. Its central reasoning was that §1225(b)(2)(A) did not apply to Herrera Avila because he had “lived in the country for years without seeking any lawful immigration status, such as naturalization, asylum, [or] refugee designation,” and was therefore not “seeking admission” within the meaning of the statute. The court also reasoned that applying §1225(b)(2)(A) to interior immigrants like Herrera Avila would render portions of the Laken Riley Act, 8 U.S.C. §1226(c), surplusage.6 The court ordered the government to release Herrera Avila or provide a bond hearing within seven days. The government complied with the hearing requirement, and Herrera Avila was released on $7,500 bond. The government then appealed to the Eighth Circuit.

The Eighth Circuit’s Decision

A. The Majority’s Textual Analysis

Writing for the majority, Judge Shepherd reversed the district court and held that §1225(b)(2)(A) authorized the government’s detention of Herrera Avila without bond. The court reviewed questions of statutory interpretation de novo. Mader v. United States, 654 F.3d 794, 800 (8th Cir. 2011) (en banc).

The majority’s primary argument was textual: the ordinary meanings of “applicant for admission” and “seeking admission” are functionally the same. Both “apply” and “seek” mean, at their cores, to request or ask for something. The majority agreed with the Fifth Circuit’s analysis in Buenrostro-Mendez, 166 F.4th at 502, that “[w]hen a person applies for something, they are necessarily seeking it.” The analogy offered was apt: just as a college applicant continues to “seek admission” while waiting for a decision, even without taking any further affirmative steps after submitting an application, a noncitizen who has entered without inspection continues to “seek admission” so long as they remain in the country without having been lawfully admitted.

The majority also found textual support in the grammatical structure of §1225(b)(2)(A) itself. The statute mandates detention “if the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.” Under Herrera Avila’s reading, the phrase “seeking admission” would be a standalone condition for detention, independent of—and separate from—the officer’s determination that the noncitizen is not clearly entitled to admission. But the majority found this reading unnatural. The statute contains no conjunctive “and” between “seeking admission” and the entitlement clause, and Congress generally signals multiple independent conditions through exactly such conjunctions. See United States v. Morales, 122 F.4th 590, 594 (5th Cir. 2024). Read naturally, “seeking admission” is simply a descriptive phrase identifying the type of noncitizen being assessed, not an independent threshold requirement.

The stowaway exception in §1225(b)(2)(B) provided additional confirmation. That provision expressly exempts stowaways from mandatory detention under §1225(b)(2)(A). But stowaways by definition do not take affirmative action toward lawful entry—they conceal themselves in transport. If “seeking admission” genuinely required present-tense, active pursuit of lawful entry, stowaways would already fall outside the provision without needing an explicit exemption. The fact that Congress wrote an express exception for stowaways implies that Congress understood “seeking admission” broadly—to encompass anyone who is in the country without having been lawfully admitted.7

The majority further grounded its reading in the statutory purpose behind §1225(a)(1)’s “applicant for admission” definition. That provision was enacted to “ensure[] that all immigrants who have not been lawfully admitted, regardless of their physical presence in the country, are placed on equal footing in removal proceedings.” Torres v. Barr, 976 F.3d 918, 928 (9th Cir. 2020). The legislative history of the IIRIRA confirms that Congress intended to eliminate the “entry doctrine” under which noncitizens who entered without inspection gained procedural advantages that those who presented at ports of entry did not. H.R. Rep. No. 104-469, pt. 1, at 225 (1996). Under the district court’s approach, Herrera Avila—who never engaged with any formal legal process—would receive a bond hearing, while a noncitizen who entered without inspection but then applied for asylum would not. That outcome inverts the statutory purpose.8

B. Responding to the Superfluous Argument

The majority spent considerable effort addressing the argument that treating “seeking admission” as synonymous with “applicant for admission” renders the former phrase surplusage, violating the canon of statutory construction that courts should give effect to every word Congress wrote. The majority invoked the Supreme Court’s recognition that “Congress, needless to say, is permitted to use synonyms in a statute.” Tyler v. Cain, 533 U.S. 656, 664 (2001). The canon against surplusage, the majority noted, is not an “overriding rule” but a default presumption that yields when the textual and structural evidence points the other way. “Redundancy is not a silver bullet[,]” particularly where the supposedly duplicative phrase carries no independent weight in the statute’s grammar. Rimini St., Inc. v. Oracle USA, Inc., 586 U.S. 334, 346 (2019). Because the grammatical structure of §1225(b)(2)(A) does not signal that “seeking admission” is an additional, independent condition, treating it as a synonym simply reflects ordinary legislative drafting.

The majority also addressed the district court’s argument that applying §1225(b)(2)(A) to interior immigrants renders the Laken Riley Act’s mandatory detention provisions in §1226(c) partially redundant. The court acknowledged overlap but explained that the two provisions operate differently. Section 1226(c) covers not only inadmissible noncitizens—the group reached by §1225(b)(2)(A)—but also noncitizens who were previously admitted and later became deportable, such as visa overstays. Section 1226(c) also eliminates the parole option that remains available under §1225(b)(2)(A). The Laken Riley Act’s targeted provisions addressing inadmissible noncitizens who entered without inspection likely reflected Congress’s desire to be “doubly sure” that such individuals could not obtain parole, enacted at a time when the executive branch was not yet exercising the full detention authority the statute had always conferred. See Barton v. Barr, 590 U.S. 222, 239 (2020).9

On legislative history, the majority’s approach was straightforward: the text is clear, so the legislative history is irrelevant. Herrera Avila had argued that Congress’s decision to defer implementation of §1226(c) for two years to build detention capacity—while making no such provision for §1225(b)(2)(A)—implied that Congress did not believe §1225 would apply to the vastly larger interior population. The majority dismissed this as impermissible speculation about what Congress “might have done,” see Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. 406, 428 (2024), and noted that the government’s failure to exercise the full authority granted by Congress does not diminish that authority, see Bankamerica Corp. v. United States, 462 U.S. 122, 131 (1983). The same logic dispensed with the argument based on Jennings v. Rodriguez, 583 U.S. 281 (2018), whose description of §1225 as a border-focused statute was offered as background and was not a holding on the question presented here.10

The Dissent

Judge Erickson dissented, arguing that the majority’s reading was inconsistent with the plain meaning of the word “seeking,” the broader structure of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and three decades of consistent practice under the IIRIRA. His dissent is careful, contextually grounded, and deserves serious consideration—both on its own merits and as a preview of the arguments that will likely animate future challenges.

The dissent’s textual argument began with the word “seeking” itself. As a present participle, “seeking” expresses ongoing, active conduct. Applied in ordinary usage, someone who is “seeking admission” is actively trying to gain entry. Herrera Avila entered the country without inspection in 2006 and 2016, made a home in Minneapolis, and took no steps toward formal admission. Whatever else he was doing in August 2025, he was not—in any natural sense of the phrase—“seeking admission.” The dissent argued that the majority achieved its result by using a statutory term of art (“applicant for admission”) to classify Herrera Avila, then leveraging the ordinary meanings of the same underlying concepts to treat “seeking” and “applying” as interchangeable. The dissent saw this as circular reasoning dressed up as textual analysis.11

Judge Erickson’s structural argument drew on the history of the IIRIRA. Before 1996, noncitizens who entered without inspection were placed in deportation proceedings and eligible for bond; those who arrived at ports of entry faced exclusion proceedings and mandatory detention. The IIRIRA merged these tracks into a single removal proceeding, equalizing the substantive standards of removability. But on the dissent’s reading, the IIRIRA preserved the old detention distinction. The statute’s continued use of “seeking admission”—language associated with the border context—and the provision’s title reference to “inspection” and “arriving aliens” suggested that §1225(b)(2)(A) was not quietly extended to cover the entire undocumented interior population. Congress knew how to target interior immigrants for mandatory detention—and when it wanted to do so, it did so explicitly, as with the Laken Riley Act’s specific provisions for inadmissible noncitizens who entered without inspection. See 8 U.S.C. §1226(c)(1)(E)(i). On the dissent’s logic, the majority’s holding renders those targeted provisions largely unnecessary.

The dissent also placed significant weight on the consistent executive practice of five presidential administrations—including President Trump’s first term—that treated §1225 as a border-focused provision. Under Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 386 (2024), consistent longstanding government practice can inform a court’s understanding of what a statute means. The majority dismissed this practice as a failure to exercise available authority, but the dissent treated it as evidence that the authority was never understood to exist in the first place.

Perhaps most significantly, Judge Erickson grounded his dissent in constitutional principle. Once a noncitizen is inside the United States, the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment applies to them. As the Supreme Court recognized in Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693 (2001), “[o]nce an alien enters the country, the legal circumstance changes, for the Due Process Clause applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” Government authority that the Constitution tolerates at the border—summary detention without individualized review—is “intolerable in the interior.” Buenrostro-Mendez, 166 F.4th at 519 (Douglas, J., dissenting). Under the majority’s ruling, a person who has lived in the United States for nineteen years, raised a family, and built a life can be detained indefinitely without any individualized assessment of their flight risk or danger to the community. That, the dissent argued, is a result that Congress should have spelled out unmistakably if it intended it—and it did not.12

The Emerging Circuit Landscape

Herrera Avila now stands alongside Buenrostro-Mendez as the second circuit court decision to hold that §1225(b)(2)(A) applies to interior immigrants. The Fifth Circuit in Buenrostro-Mendez, 166 F.4th at 502, reached the same conclusion through substantially similar statutory analysis, in a decision that produced both a concurrence and a dissent highlighting the same constitutional and structural concerns that animated Judge Erickson’s dissent in Herrera Avila. The Seventh Circuit in Castañon-Nava v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security, 161 F.4th 1048 (7th Cir. 2025), discussed the detention authority in the context of a preliminary injunction challenge to warrantless arrests, and also rejected the argument that “seeking admission” requires present-tense affirmative action, though that issue was not the primary holding in that case.13

Meanwhile, district courts in the Fifth Circuit have continued to grant habeas relief on due process grounds even after Buenrostro-Mendez. See, e.g., Alvarez-Rico v. Noem, Case No. 4:26-CV-00729, 2026 WL 522322 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 25, 2026). This divergence reflects an important recognition: even if §1225(b)(2)(A) authorizes mandatory detention as a statutory matter, the Constitution may impose independent limits on the indefinite detention of individuals who have deep roots in the United States. The Fifth Circuit’s majority acknowledged this distinction, but its resolution remains for future courts.14

The Ninth, Second, Third, and Fourth Circuits have not yet directly addressed whether §1225(b)(2)(A) applies to interior immigrants. In circuits where the question remains open, the arguments advanced by Judge Erickson’s dissent, the Buenrostro-Mendez dissenters, and the post-Buenrostro-Mendez district courts retain considerable force. The constitutional due process argument in particular may prove more durable than the statutory debate, because it does not depend on resolving the “seeking admission” interpretive question in any particular way.

Ultimately, the depth of the legal disagreement—reflected in a circuit split, vigorous dissents, and competing district court rulings on constitutional grounds—makes Supreme Court review a realistic prospect. The stakes, both for individual immigrants and for the structure of the immigration system, are significant enough to support a petition for certiorari in either Buenrostro-Mendez or Herrera Avila itself.

Practical Implications

A. For the Immigration System Generally

The Eighth Circuit’s holding, taken at face value, is sweeping. Under Herrera Avila, any noncitizen present in the United States who was never lawfully admitted—regardless of how long they have been here—is subject to mandatory detention without bond under 8 U.S.C. §1225(b)(2)(A) upon apprehension in the Eighth Circuit. That statutory mandate eliminates the individualized bond hearing that has been the norm for interior immigrants since 1996. An immigration judge cannot weigh the facts of a particular case, cannot consider family ties or employment or community roots, and cannot set a bond proportionate to the flight risk presented. The only release mechanism is the narrow parole authority in 8 U.S.C. §1182(d)(5)(A), which is limited by both statute and agency policy to extraordinary circumstances.15

This represents a fundamental shift. For nearly thirty years, the bond hearing served as the immigration system’s principal mechanism for distinguishing between immigrants who posed genuine flight or safety risks and those who did not. It was not a perfect mechanism, and its outcomes depended heavily on the judge, the circuit, and the resources available to the immigrant. But it existed. Under Herrera Avila, within the Eighth Circuit, it no longer does for this class of immigrants.

The practical burden on the detention system could be enormous. Congress deferred implementation of §1226(c)’s mandatory detention for noncitizens with criminal convictions by two years when it enacted the IIRIRA in 1996, explicitly because the government needed time to build detention capacity for what it estimated would be an additional 45,000 detainees. No such accommodation has been made for a ruling that, on its face, subjects millions more to mandatory detention. The gap between statutory authority and operational capacity will shape how consistently this ruling is enforced in practice.

B. For Immigrants in the Interior Without Lawful Status

For undocumented immigrants living in the Eighth Circuit—which encompasses Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota—the implications are direct and urgent. If apprehended by ICE, they may be detained without bond for the entire duration of removal proceedings. Those proceedings can take years. The prospect of years of detention, without any individualized hearing, creates enormous pressure to accept voluntary departure or other concessions rather than pursue claims that may ultimately be meritorious.

For immigrants like Herrera Avila personally, the procedural situation is somewhat resolved. He obtained a bond hearing under the district court’s order, and the government did not return him to detention after the Eighth Circuit reversed. But his case illustrates the core vulnerability: nineteen years of residence, a family, a community—none of it counts when §1225(b)(2)(A) is applied. The only legal protection that may remain is a constitutional one: a separate habeas petition arguing that prolonged mandatory detention of someone with such deep roots in the country violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. As noted above, district courts in the Fifth Circuit have been granting such relief even after Buenrostro-Mendez, and that avenue has not been closed.16

For immigration practitioners, several approaches merit consideration in the wake of Herrera Avila. First, in circuits that have not yet ruled on the §1225(b)(2)(A) question—the Ninth, Second, Third, and Fourth Circuits—the statutory argument against mandatory detention for interior immigrants remains alive, and the dissent in Herrera Avila and the dissenters in Buenrostro-Mendez provide a roadmap. Second, constitutional due process arguments based on the length and conditions of detention are available in all circuits, and their strength increases with the duration of the individual’s residence in the United States and the depth of their community ties. Third, immigration counsel should assess whether clients have any available form of relief—cancellation of removal, withholding of removal, asylum, or relief under the Convention Against Torture—that might both provide substantive protection and support a constitutional argument against indefinite pre-hearing detention.

Finally, and most urgently, Herrera Avila is a sharp reminder of the cost of inaction. For undocumented immigrants who entered without inspection and have not pursued any formal path to relief—whether through cancellation of removal, asylum, special immigrant juvenile status, or another avenue—the window to act is narrowing. The longer an individual waits, the greater the risk that an encounter with law enforcement, however minor, becomes the trigger for mandatory detention and an expedited removal process in which they have lost access to the bond hearing that might have allowed them to remain free during proceedings. The time to consult an immigration attorney and assess available options is before that encounter, not after.17

Conclusion

Herrera Avila v. Bondi is a significant decision—not because it creates new law from nothing, but because it resolves a long-contested question in the government’s favor and in the process eliminates a procedural protection that millions of immigrants had, in practice, been able to rely on for three decades. The majority’s statutory analysis is careful and draws on a coherent reading of the text. But the dissent’s structural and constitutional concerns are serious, and the question it leaves open—whether the Due Process Clause independently limits mandatory detention of long-term interior residents—may prove as important as the statutory question that Herrera Avila resolves.

For now, the result is clear within the Eighth Circuit: an undocumented immigrant apprehended anywhere in the circuit faces mandatory detention without bond. The practical implications of that result will unfold over years of enforcement, litigation, and—almost certainly—further Supreme Court review.

  1. Herrera Avila v. Bondi, No. 25-3248 (8th Cir. Mar. 25, 2026) (published opinion). The Eighth Circuit’s jurisdiction rested on 28 U.S.C. §§1291 and 2253(a). The panel consisted of Judges Shepherd, Erickson, and Grasz; Judge Erickson dissented.
  2. The Fifth Circuit had reached the same conclusion earlier in 2026 in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, 166 F.4th 494 (5th Cir. 2026), also over a dissent. Both decisions are consistent with the Seventh Circuit’s discussion of the issue in Castañon-Nava v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security, 161 F.4th 1048 (7th Cir. 2025), though the latter case involved a different primary issue.
  3. For the historical background of the exclusion/deportation distinction and its role in the IIRIRA, see Martinez v. Att’y Gen., 693 F.3d 408, 413 n.5 (3d Cir. 2012). The relevant legislative history is discussed in H.R. Rep. No. 104-469, pt. 1, at 225 (1996), which explains that §1225(a)(1) was “intended to replace certain aspects of the current ‘entry doctrine’ under which illegal aliens who have entered the United States without inspection gain equities and privileges . . . that are not available to aliens who present themselves for inspection at a port of entry.”
  4. For a comprehensive overview of immigration detention law, including the role of §1225 and §1226 and the framework for custody determinations, see Immigration Detention Defense, MyAttorneyUSA.
  5. The parole authority in 8 U.S.C. §1182(d)(5)(A) is limited by both the statute and DHS policy to case-by-case releases for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” As the Fifth Circuit noted in Buenrostro-Mendez, 166 F.4th at 499 n.3, this is a narrow safety valve that offers little relief as a practical matter for most detainees.
  6. The Laken Riley Act, Pub. L. No. 119-1, was enacted in January 2025 and codified at 8 U.S.C. §1226(c). It extended mandatory detention to categories of inadmissible noncitizens who had committed specified offenses, including those who entered without inspection. The district court reasoned that if §1225(b)(2)(A) already covered all inadmissible interior immigrants, the Laken Riley Act’s targeted provisions would have been unnecessary.
  7. The stowaway definition appears at 8 U.S.C. §1101(a)(49). The majority’s stowaway argument was also advanced in Buenrostro-Mendez, 166 F.4th at 503–04. The dissenters in both cases contested this reading, arguing that a stowaway could reasonably be understood as “seeking admission” once the vessel or aircraft reaches the United States. See Herrera Avila, No. 25-3248, slip op. at 13–14 n.6 (Erickson, J., dissenting).
  8. Torres v. Barr, 976 F.3d 918, 928 (9th Cir. 2020), was cited by both the Eighth Circuit majority and the Fifth Circuit in Buenrostro-Mendez for the proposition that §1225(a)(1) was designed to place all unadmitted immigrants on equal footing. The Ninth Circuit has not yet directly resolved the mandatory detention question under §1225(b)(2)(A) for interior immigrants.
  9. On the relationship between §1225(b)(2)(A) and §1226(c), see the detailed analysis in Buenrostro-Mendez, 166 F.4th at 504–06. For background on mandatory detention under §1226(c) and the Joseph Hearing process for challenging its application, see Joseph Hearing, MyAttorneyUSA.
  10. Jennings v. Rodriguez, 583 U.S. 281 (2018), arose from a challenge to prolonged detention without periodic bond hearings and addressed three INA detention provisions: §1225(b), §1226(a), and §1226(c). The Court’s description of these provisions as applying, generally, to different populations was background context, not a holding on whether §1225 applies to interior immigrants. For a detailed analysis of Jennings and its significance for immigration detention jurisprudence, see EOIR’s Nationwide Guidance on Maldonado-Bautista: A Deep Dive into Immigration Detention, Bond Hearings, and Key Precedents, MyAttorneyUSA.
  11. The dissent cited Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary for the definition of “seek” as “to ask for” or “to try to acquire or gain,” and emphasized that as a present participle, “seeking” typically expresses present, active conduct. The dissent also cited Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 170 (2012), for the principle that a variation in statutory terms suggests a variation in meaning.
  12. Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693 (2001) (holding that the Due Process Clause “applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent”). For background on habeas corpus as a tool for challenging immigration detention, including its use in the context of prolonged pre-final order custody, see Habeas Corpus: The Lifeline for Immigrants Trapped in America’s Detention Machine, MyAttorneyUSA.
  13. Castañon-Nava v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security, 161 F.4th 1048, 1061 (7th Cir. 2025). The Seventh Circuit’s primary issue was whether DHS could make warrantless arrests of noncitizens, not the scope of §1225(b)(2)(A) detention. Its discussion of the detention provision arose as a government defense to the injunction.
  14. Alvarez-Rico v. Noem, Case No. 4:26-CV-00729, 2026 WL 522322 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 25, 2026). Multiple district courts in the Fifth Circuit have granted habeas relief on due process grounds following Buenrostro-Mendez, reflecting the distinct constitutional question that remains open even where the statutory question has been resolved against the immigrant.
  15. For background on how immigration bond hearings work, including the standards for bond redetermination before immigration judges and the scope of review, see Immigration Detention Defense, MyAttorneyUSA. For the Attorney General’s 2019 decision holding that noncitizens in expedited removal proceedings are ineligible for bond—a related line of mandatory detention jurisprudence—see Matter of M-S-, 27 I&N Dec. 509 (A.G. 2019), analyzed at AG Holds That Aliens Screened From Expedited Removal Are Ineligible For Bond, MyAttorneyUSA.
  16. The constitutional theory available to long-term interior residents draws on Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001) (imposing due process limits on post-final-order detention), and on Justice Douglas’s dissent in Buenrostro-Mendez, 166 F.4th at 519, which argued that the distinction between the border and the interior is constitutionally significant for detention purposes. The availability of this theory in the Eighth Circuit itself, following Herrera Avila, is uncertain but has not been foreclosed.
  17. For a broader discussion of the importance of consulting with immigration counsel early—particularly for immigrants who entered without inspection and have not pursued formal relief—see the firm’s immigration detention resources and related articles on deportation and removal. The forms of relief that may be available to long-term undocumented immigrants include cancellation of removal under 8 U.S.C. §1229b(b), asylum and withholding of removal, protection under the Convention Against Torture, and—in some circumstances—adjustment of status or special immigrant classification.