Jennings v. Rodriguez
Whether the Immigration and Nationality Act's detention provisions can be interpreted — using the constitutional avoidance canon — to require periodic bond hearings every six months for immigrants held in prolonged detention during removal proceedings.
The Decision
5-3 decision · Opinion by Samuel Alito · 2018
Majority Opinion— Samuel Alitoconcurring ↓dissent ↓
In a 5–3 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito (with Justice Elena Kagan recused), the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit and sent the case back to the lower courts for further proceedings. The majority held that the Ninth Circuit had fundamentally misapplied the constitutional avoidance canon by reading into the INA a bond hearing requirement that simply does not exist in the text of the statute.
Justice Alito's majority opinion walked through each of the three INA detention provisions at issue. For Section 1225(b), which governs detention of certain arriving aliens, the Court found that the statute provides for mandatory detention and says nothing about bond hearings. For Section 1226(c), which mandates detention for immigrants with certain criminal convictions, the statute similarly requires detention without offering a bond hearing mechanism. For Section 1226(a), which gives the Attorney General discretion to detain or release immigrants on bond, the majority found that nothing in the text requires automatic, periodic bond hearings at six-month intervals — discretionary authority to grant bond is not the same as a mandate to hold recurring hearings.
The heart of the majority's reasoning was about the proper limits of the constitutional avoidance canon. The Court emphasized that this interpretive principle only applies when a statute is genuinely ambiguous and there are competing plausible readings. It does not give courts license to rewrite clear statutory language or to add provisions that Congress did not include. The majority concluded that the Ninth Circuit had effectively invented a new statutory scheme — complete with specific timelines and burden-of-proof rules — that bore no resemblance to anything in the actual text of the INA.
Critically, the Supreme Court did not decide whether prolonged immigration detention without bond hearings violates the Constitution. By reversing the Ninth Circuit's statutory interpretation, the Court cleared the way for the lower courts to address the constitutional questions directly on remand. The decision thus left open the possibility that some or all of the challenged detention practices might still be found unconstitutional, but it insisted that such a conclusion must be reached through constitutional analysis rather than through creative statutory reinterpretation.
Concurring Opinions
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurrence, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, arguing that the case raised serious jurisdictional problems. Thomas contended that the INA's jurisdiction-stripping provisions barred federal courts from hearing class-wide challenges to immigration detention in the first place, and that the lower courts lacked authority to grant the injunctive relief they ordered. This concurrence suggested that even reaching the statutory interpretation question was going too far.
Dissenting Opinions
Stephen Breyerjoined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Breyer argued that the Ninth Circuit correctly applied the constitutional avoidance canon, because reading the statute to permit indefinite detention without any hearing would raise extraordinarily serious constitutional problems under the Due Process Clause. He contended the Court should either uphold the Ninth Circuit's narrowing construction or reach the constitutional merits and find that prolonged detention without bond hearings is unconstitutional.
- The liberty interest at stake — freedom from prolonged physical confinement — is among the most fundamental rights recognized by the Constitution, and any statute touching on it should be construed narrowly to preserve that liberty.
- The majority's rigid textualism ignores a long tradition of courts reading immigration detention statutes to include implied limitations in order to avoid constitutional doubt, including the Court's own approach in prior cases like Zadvydas v. Davis.
- Breyer argued that as a practical matter, thousands of immigrants are being held for months or years without any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention, and the Court's decision leaves them without a remedy while further litigation drags on.
- The dissent emphasized that the constitutional avoidance canon exists precisely for situations like this — where a literal reading of a statute would produce results that raise grave constitutional concerns — and criticized the majority for narrowing the canon's usefulness.
Background & Facts
Alejandro Rodriguez was a lawful permanent resident of the United States who had lived in the country since he was an infant. After he was convicted of certain criminal offenses, immigration authorities placed him in removal proceedings and detained him under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Rodriguez spent over three years in immigration detention without ever receiving a hearing to determine whether his continued confinement was justified. He believed this prolonged detention without any meaningful review was unlawful.
Rodriguez filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court on behalf of a broad group of immigrants who were similarly detained for extended periods under three key provisions of the INA: Section 1225(b), which mandates detention for certain arriving aliens and those in expedited removal proceedings; Section 1226(c), which mandates detention for immigrants convicted of certain crimes or involved in terrorism; and Section 1226(a), which gives the government discretion to detain or release other immigrants during their removal proceedings. The class argued that all of these individuals were entitled to periodic bond hearings — specifically, a hearing every six months — at which the government would have to justify continued detention.
The federal district court in California agreed with Rodriguez and certified the class, then issued a preliminary injunction ordering bond hearings every six months. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed this ruling. Importantly, the Ninth Circuit did not rule that the Constitution required these hearings. Instead, it used a principle of statutory interpretation called the 'constitutional avoidance canon,' reasoning that the INA's detention provisions should be read to implicitly require periodic bond hearings in order to avoid the serious constitutional problems — particularly due process violations — that would arise from indefinite detention without judicial review.
David Jennings, the field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case on behalf of the government. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case because it raised fundamental questions about the scope of federal immigration detention authority and the proper use of interpretive tools by lower courts when handling immigration statutes.
The Arguments
The government argued that the INA's detention provisions mean exactly what they say: certain categories of immigrants must be detained during removal proceedings, and the statute does not require periodic bond hearings. The Ninth Circuit improperly rewrote the law by reading in requirements that Congress never enacted.
- Section 1225(b) and Section 1226(c) both mandate detention with no statutory provision for bond hearings, and courts cannot add such provisions on their own.
- The constitutional avoidance canon is a tool for choosing between plausible readings of ambiguous text — it does not authorize courts to invent entirely new statutory requirements that have no basis in the statute's language.
- Congress made deliberate policy choices in the INA about which detained immigrants can receive bond hearings and which cannot, and courts must respect those choices.
Rodriguez argued that the INA's detention provisions should be read to include an implicit limitation on how long the government can hold immigrants without providing a bond hearing, because interpreting the statute to allow indefinite detention without any hearing would create severe constitutional problems under the Due Process Clause.
- Prolonged civil detention without any judicial review raises profound due process concerns that courts have long recognized, and the statute should be interpreted to avoid those concerns.
- The constitutional avoidance canon is well-established and permits courts to adopt narrowing interpretations of statutes to save them from constitutional invalidity.
- A bond hearing every six months is a modest, workable requirement that protects individual liberty without preventing the government from detaining those who pose a genuine flight risk or danger.