The Trump administration is aiming to make illegal migrants ineligible for bond hearings as they contest their deportation cases in court.
All foreign nationals who unlawfully crossed the U.S.-Mexico border must remain in detention for the duration of their deportation proceedings, according to interim guidance ordered by acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Todd Lyons, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed Tuesday. The directive, which was dated earlier in July, is expected to apply to millions of illegal migrants currently living in the country.
“The Biden administration dangerously unleashed millions of unvetted illegal aliens into American communities — and they used many loopholes to do so,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a public statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe,” McLaughlin continued. “Politicians and activists can cry wolf all they want, but it won’t deter this administration from keeping these criminals and lawbreakers off American streets — and now thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, we will have plenty of bed space to do so.”
The policy change could prove monumental in disincentivizing illegal immigration, with countless illegal migrants having long been allowed to live and work freely in the U.S. after being released from immigration custody, typically due to limited detention capacity.
“Detention is absolutely the best way to approach this, if you can do it,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates for lower levels of immigration, stated to the Washington Post. The Post first reported on the ICE directive.
“It costs a lot of money, obviously,” Krikorian continued. “You’re pretty much guaranteed to be able to remove the person, if there’s a negative finding, if he’s in detention.”
Due to capacity limitations and other factors, ICE detains noncitizens “only when necessary,” according to its 2024 annual report. However, illegal migrants are currently subject to mandatory detention without bond if they’ve been convicted of murder or other heinous crimes — and Trump signed into law the Laken Riley Act, requiring mandatory detention of illegal migrants involved in theft-related crimes.
The directive by Lyons follows President Donald Trump’s signing of the Big, Beautiful Bill into law, which supercharges funding for ICE enforcement and detention.
Approximately $170 billion in funding from the mega-bill has been designated for immigration and border enforcement. Of this funding, more than $45 billion is specifically earmarked for ICE detention space over the next four years, which will open tens of thousands of new beds at ICE facilities across the U.S.
As of June 29, just over 57,800 individuals were in ICE detention, according to the latest data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The Trump administration anticipates that an enormous cash infusion will allow the country’s detention capacity to expand to roughly 100,000 beds, allowing room to keep more migrants detained, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include a statement from the Department of Homeland Security.
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