The panel said the detention law the administration relied on applies to people arriving at the border, not to immigrants who entered years ago and were later arrested inside the country.
"The 2-1 ruling is the ninth straight appeals court rejection," Politico legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney wrote on X.
Eight other federal appeals courts had already ruled the same way, according to the opinion, which cited decisions from the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th and 11th Circuits.
Judge Nicole Berner wrote the majority opinion, joined by Senior Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, and closed it by turning to two episodes of mass imprisonment in American history. The 1892 Geary Act ordered the detention and "hard labor" of Chinese people found to be in the country unlawfully, the opinion said. Fifty years later, the government sent nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent to internment camps.
"Mass detention of marginalized individuals without due process harkens back to some of the darkest moments in our country's history," Berner wrote.
"Those shameful and abhorrent past detentions were limited in scope in comparison to the mandatory detention that the Government urges us today to find that Congress established thirty years ago in an ambiguously worded statutory provision," the opinion said. "We decline to do so."
"[I]n passing [the 1996 law] thirty years ago, Congress intended to direct the single largest mass detention of human beings in our nation's history," the ruling said, describing what the government's reading would require the court to believe.
The government conceded that roughly 2 million people would have been newly subject to mandatory detention in 1996, the year the law passed, according to the opinion. The court put the number at about 6 million today.
The panel said courts assume Congress does not hide sweeping changes in vague language.
When lawmakers expanded mandatory detention that same year for people convicted of certain crimes, the opinion said, they expected about 45,000 additional detentions a year and delayed the rules for two years so the government could build capacity.
"It is difficult to imagine a larger proverbial elephant," Berner wrote. "The actions of fifteen Congresses, the Supreme Court, and five presidential administrations for thirty years confirm that no such elephant exists."
Five presidential administrations read the law the other way, including Trump's first, the ruling said. A 1997 federal regulation stated that immigrants present without being admitted or paroled "will be eligible" for bond, the opinion said.
The panel said the government's reading collapses two separate phrases in the statute, "applicant for admission" and "seeking admission," into a single idea. That approach, the opinion said, "requires us to write an entire phrase—seeking admission—out of the sentence."
The court also faulted the administration for building its case on "a single sentence in the thousands of pages of legislative history," and said the government's reading "suffers several fatal defects," according to the ruling.
"The moviegoer cannot be said to be 'seeking' to enter the theater when he is already inside," the opinion said, comparing the two men to someone who slipped into a theater without paying. "Rather, he is requesting to remain."
The reading the panel rejected took effect on July 8, 2025, when ICE issued guidance titled "Interim Guidance Regarding Detention Authority for Applicants for Admission," the opinion said.
The ruling said it directed officers to treat anyone who entered without inspection as an applicant for admission subject to detention without bond. The Board of Immigration Appeals adopted the same reading soon after.
Before the change, the ruling said, people in the men's position were generally released on bond unless they had committed certain crimes, were considered flight risks or posed a danger to their communities.
More than 500 district courts rejected the new reading and sided with detainees in over 20,000 individual cases, according to the opinion.
The court borrowed a dissenting 5th Circuit judge's words for the flood of filings that followed, calling it a "tsunami" of habeas petitions, the legal challenges people file to contest being locked up. Two of those petitions came from Oscar Enrique Lopez Garcia and Juan Jose Rivera, according to the ruling.
Lopez Garcia came to the United States from Guatemala as a child in 1996 and has lived and worked in Washington, D.C., for more than 30 years, the opinion said. The ruling noted that he is married and has two children who are U.S. citizens. ICE agents detained him on Oct. 9, 2025, while he was on his way to work.
Rivera, who left El Salvador in 2005 at age 26 and has been in the United States for 20 years, has never been arrested or charged with any crime, and ICE detained him near his home in Washington on Oct. 2, 2025, according to the ruling.
"The Government does not contend that any of these circumstances applies to Lopez Garcia or Rivera," the opinion said of the crimes, flight risk and danger findings that once decided who got a bond hearing.
Both men were held at an ICE detention facility in Virginia without one, the opinion pointed out. A district court ordered hearings, and immigration judges found that neither man was a danger or a flight risk, the opinion said. Both were released on bond in November 2025.
The American Civil Liberties Union argued the case for the two men, and 20 states and the District of Columbia filed briefs supporting them, along with immigration law scholars and two national immigration groups, according to the ruling.
Two appeals courts have ruled in the administration's favor. The 5th and 8th Circuits held that the border detention provision covers everyone who has never been formally admitted/
Judge Allison Jones Rushing, whom Trump appointed and the Senate confirmed in 2019, dissented.
She wrote that the statute tells the government to treat anyone present without admission as an applicant for admission, and that an applicant is, by definition, someone asking for something.
"In other words, an applicant for admission is seeking admission. It's that simple," Rushing wrote.
"Next up: SCOTUS," Cheney wrote, using shorthand for the Supreme Court.
