The Solicitor General’s newest Supreme Court filing asks the justices to do nothing. The 230-plus pages stapled to the back of it explain how a nationwide no-bond detention policy grew out of a single immigration court, one whose reasoning the Board of Immigration Appeals had already sent back twice.
A Petition That Asks for Nothing
On October 28, the Solicitor General filed a petition in Quinones v. Rodriguez Vazquez, No. 26-568. The petition runs eleven pages. Its request is simple: hold the case until the Court decides Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, which the justices agreed to hear on October 1.
The question in both cases is whether 8 U.S.C. 1225(b)(2)(A) requires the government to detain, without a bond hearing, people who entered the country without inspection and were later arrested in the interior. The alternative is 8 U.S.C. 1226(a), which lets an immigration judge release them on bond.
The Ninth Circuit answered that question against the government on July 30, ruling 2 to 1 with Judge Bea dissenting. According to the petition, the court stayed its mandate on October 6 to wait for the Supreme Court.
That is the filing. The appendix is where the story is.
Thirty Years of Bond Hearings, Then a Memo
The petition concedes more than it advertises. It acknowledges that a 1997 rulemaking preamble said people in this position “will be eligible for bond,” and that the government kept granting bond hearings anyway.
The petition’s explanation for the change is brief. In July 2025, it says, DHS “revisited the issue” and decided its old approach did not match the statute’s text. That decision came in an interim guidance memo from Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons dated July 8, 2025, and the Board of Immigration Appeals endorsed it that September in Matter of Yajure Hurtado.
The Ninth Circuit was not persuaded. In a footnote, the majority observed that the government’s new reading means it spent roughly thirty years violating a mandatory statute while no one noticed.
The stakes are not abstract. The Vera Institute’s analysis, as relayed by TRAC, put the national detention population above 73,000 in mid-January 2026, a record. TRAC reported that people with no criminal conviction made up roughly 70 percent of those detained this spring.
Detainees responded by going to federal court. TRAC counted more than 31,000 habeas petitions between October 2025 and March 2026.
Tacoma Tried It First
The petition presents the July 2025 memo as the moment DHS rethought the law. The Ninth Circuit describes something different.
The court wrote that the government’s new interpretation “seems to have originated” with immigration judges in Tacoma, Washington, starting in 2022. The district court dated the practice to around November 2022, relying on declarations from the plaintiffs’ side.
As the district court summarized it, the Tacoma judges reasoned that anyone who entered without inspection was an applicant for admission, that Congress required their detention, and that the judges therefore had no jurisdiction to hold a bond hearing. The effect was dramatic.
The district court, citing TRAC data, noted that Tacoma judges granted bond in only 3 percent of requests in fiscal year 2023. That was the lowest rate of any immigration court in the country.
The Board of Immigration Appeals did not sign on. In April 2023 and again in September 2023, it issued unpublished decisions sending Tacoma cases back to the immigration judges. In the second, the Board said it was “unaware of any precedent” stating that an immigration judge lacks authority to reconsider custody conditions.
Advocates asked the Board to publish one of those decisions as precedent. The Board declined, and three of the four Tacoma judges kept denying bond.
Then came July 2025. The district court wrote that the DHS memo “effectively adopts the Tacoma IJs’ interpretation.” The agency had taken a theory the Board had sent back twice and made it national policy.
One inference, flagged as such: because the 2023 Board decisions were unpublished, they set no precedent, which would explain how a theory the Board had twice sent back stayed alive in Tacoma. That reasoning rests on the district court’s account of the Board’s refusal to publish. The record does not say who carried the theory from Tacoma to Washington, or when.
The Chronology the Petition Skips
The petition’s own facts contain the clue. Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez was arrested in February 2025, and an immigration judge denied him a bond hearing on the ground that 1225(b)(2)(A) mandated his detention. The district court certified a class of Tacoma detainees on May 2, 2025.
Both events predate the July memo the petition treats as the turning point. The petition does not say that the denial he challenged came from the Tacoma practice, which the Ninth Circuit says predated the government’s own reversal.
Rodriguez Vazquez had lived in Washington for sixteen years before he was detained, according to the district court. After a preliminary injunction forced a bond hearing, he was denied bond anyway.
He then left the country rather than keep fighting. The district court treated that as mooting his individual claims, and the class claims continued without him.
The petition also never mentions the circuit split that the Ninth Circuit lays out in detail. The Fifth and Eighth Circuits sided with the government. The Second, Sixth, Tenth and Eleventh sided against it, and the Seventh produced a splintered result.
Administration lawyers have made the same point in the companion case, calling the situation an “unworkable patchwork”.
Inquiries are being directed to DHS and ICE, DOJ and the Executive Office for Immigration Review. Among the questions that remain unanswered:
First, what did DHS and DOJ conclude about the Board’s 2023 remands before adopting the Tacoma theory in July 2025? Second, who made that decision, and what legal analysis justified abandoning the position taken in 1997? Third, how are members of the Tacoma class being treated now, while the Ninth Circuit’s mandate is stayed?
The Supreme Court will eventually decide what Congress meant in 1996. Whether anyone at the agencies will explain how a Tacoma courtroom’s reading became federal policy is a separate question, and the Solicitor General’s petition does not ask it.
