In September 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, together with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, the ACLU of New Hampshire, the ACLU of Maine, the law firm Araujo and Fisher, the law firm Foley Hoag, and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, filed a class action lawsuit in federal court to challenge the widespread denial of bond hearings to people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As the complaint demonstrates, this denial upends decades of settled law and established practice in immigration proceedings.
The complaint alleges that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice recently and abruptly began to misclassify people arrested by ICE inside the United States. DHS and DOJ started systematically reclassifying these people from the statutory authority of 8 U.S.C. § 1226, which usually allows for the opportunity to request bond during removal proceedings, to the no-bond detention provisions of 8 U.S.C. § 1225, which does not apply to people arrested in the interior of the United States and placed in removal proceedings.
This case is brought on behalf of Jose Arnulfo Guerrero Orellana and a putative class of similarly situated individuals. Mr. Guerrero Orellana has been living in the United States for over a decade. He brings this case to vindicate his own right to a bond hearing — where an immigration judge can determine whether his detention is justified to protect the community or ensure his appearance in court — and that of thousands of other detainees in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and New Hampshire who will be denied the opportunity to seek release on bond under the new legal ruling adopted by the executive branch. The complaint alleges that the government's new policy violates constitutional and statutory due process rights as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.
