A federal appeals court headquartered in San Francisco ruled Thursday that the Trump administration cannot jail immigrants arrested inside the country without offering them a bond hearing — a decision that binds every ICE detention facility in California and could free thousands of people held while their removal cases grind on.

The 2-1 ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — the San Francisco-based court whose jurisdiction covers California and eight other Western states — strikes down a 2025 Trump policy that had swept interior immigrants into the same mandatory, no-bond detention long reserved for people caught at the border. For Bay Area families who have watched relatives vanish into ICE custody after airport stops and workplace raids, the practical stakes are immediate: attorneys say detainees across the circuit should once again get to argue for release in front of a judge.

The case began not in California but in Tacoma, Washington, with Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez, a man who had lived in the United States without permanent legal status since 2009. Arrested last year, he was denied bail by an immigration judge and filed a habeas petition and a class-action lawsuit. A federal district judge sided with him; on Thursday, a Ninth Circuit panel agreed, upholding that ruling (Courthouse News).

The opinion was written by Judge Daniel Bress — a Trump appointee — and joined by Judge M. Margaret McKeown, a Clinton appointee. Judge Carlos Bea, a George W. Bush appointee, dissented at length.

At the center of the fight are two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. For decades, immigrants detained in the interior were held under Section 1226, which allows them to post bond; people apprehended at the border were held under Section 1225, which does not. In 2025, the administration issued guidance folding all "unadmitted aliens" — anyone in the country without authorization — into mandatory detention, arguing that everyone here illegally is an "applicant for admission."

The panel rejected that reading. The government's position, Bress wrote, "is inconsistent with ordinary language usage," and the phrase applied to people "entering at the border," not to someone arrested by immigration officers, as he put it, in a Home Depot parking lot. "Historically, the law regarded unadmitted aliens present in the interior of the United States as subject to release on bond during the pendency of their removal proceedings," the opinion states, adding that the understanding "persisted after the 1996 amendments" to the act (as reported by SFist). The court did not decide whether Congress could mandate such detention — only that it had not.

For immigrants' advocates, the ruling reaches far beyond one plaintiff. "This is huge for our class members and others who are similarly situated throughout the Ninth Circuit," Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said in an email quoted by Courthouse News. He said the Justice Department had not been complying with the earlier district-court order, forcing detainees to file individual habeas petitions to enforce it. "Most detained people in removal proceedings do not have an attorney and are unable to file habeas petitions," Adams said. "But now, in light of today's decision, they should once again have immediate access to bond hearings, so that they can return to their families and work during these lengthy immigration proceedings."

The decision does not apply to people arrested at or near the border, or to those with certain criminal offenses. It also lands as ICE has escalated its reach inside the Bay Area — detaining travelers at SFO and Oakland airports and pushing to build a holding facility near Gilroy, stories The Dissent has tracked through the summer.

The reprieve may be temporary. Bress noted that the appellate courts are split: the Fifth and Eighth Circuits have sided with the government, while the Second, Sixth, Tenth, Eleventh and now Ninth have sided with detainees, and the Seventh failed to reach a majority. That kind of division is the classic setup for a Supreme Court review — which, if the justices take the case, likely would not come until next year. In the meantime, as Bress acknowledged, thousands of habeas petitions remain pending in federal courts across the country.