The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Wednesday that more immigrants in detention should receive bond hearings and those held more than a year should get additional hearings. The court held that immigrants who have been detained for over a year should get bond hearings every six months where the federal government must show why they should remain locked up. The court concluded:

By upholding the district court’s order that Immigration Judges must hold bond hearings for certain detained individuals, we are not ordering Immigration Judges to release any single individual; rather we are affirming a minimal procedural safeguard—a hearing at which the government bears only an intermediate burden of proof in demonstrating danger to the community or risk of flight—to ensure that after a lengthy period of detention, the government continues to have a legitimate interest in the further deprivation of an individual’s liberty.

The ruling affirms and expands a 2013 ruling [ACLU materials] in which the appeals court held that immigrants were entitled to bond hearings after six months. American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Ahilan Arulanantham, who represented the plaintiffs in this case stated that, “[the ruling] substantially decreases the likelihood people will get lost in the system for years on end because there will be some examination of why the person is still incarcerated.”

US immigration law [JURIST backgrounder] continues to be a controversial and heavily politicized area of law at both the state and federal levels. In August a California judge upheld her July decision [JURIST reports] and ordered the government to release immigrant children held in family detention centers, “without necessary delay.” In February a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked [JURIST report] two key parts of a recent immigration initiative announced by US President Barack Obama [official website] that would halt the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. In November a judge for the US District Court for the District of Arizona [official website] struck down [JURIST report] an Arizona law that made smuggling immigrants a state crime because it conflicts with federal laws governing immigration. In August 2013 the Obama administration released [JURIST report] a policy directive known as the “Family Interest Directive,” emphasizing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should apply “prosecutorial discretion” towards undocumented immigrant parents of minors to limit detaining parents and to safeguard their parental rights.