The petitioner, identified by the pseudonym J.Z.S., entered the United States in November 2023 near Eagle Pass, Texas, and reunited with his mother in Chicago. According to the petition, he fled Venezuela after years of physical abuse by his father. After arriving, he was hospitalized for two weeks following a psychotic episode, arrested in Chicago for jumping a subway turnstile, and later charged in Florida with two counts of resisting arrest without violence, aggravated assault, and battery after an altercation he described as initiated by another man. All charges except one count of resisting an officer without violence were dropped, and he was sentenced to time served. ICE arrested him in February 2025 when he appeared for a routine check-in.
At a May 2025 bond hearing, an immigration judge placed the burden on J.Z.S. to show he was neither a danger nor a flight risk. The IJ denied bond in an order that stated only that bond was denied because of danger and flight risk. J.Z.S. filed his habeas petition in February 2026, more than a year after his initial detention.
Chief Judge David L. Bunning of the Eastern District of Kentucky first resolved a threshold dispute over which detention statute applied. The government argued J.Z.S. was an applicant for admission subject to mandatory detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2). The court rejected that reading, holding that § 1225(b)(2) requires not only that a noncitizen be an applicant for admission but also that the person be actively seeking admission — a condition J.Z.S., who had lived in the United States for over two years, did not meet. The court noted that the government's own paperwork, including the Notice to Appear and the arrest warrant, cited § 1226 as the authority for his detention, and that the IJ had in fact granted a bond hearing, further confirming § 1226(a) governed his case.
The court also held that the government's broad reading of § 1225(b)(2) would render the Laken Riley Act — enacted in January 2025 to add mandatory detention requirements for noncitizens charged with or convicted of certain crimes — entirely superfluous, since under the government's theory § 1225 would already mandate detention of virtually all undocumented noncitizens regardless of how long they had been in the country.
On the constitutional question, the court applied the Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test and sided with the First and Second Circuits, which have held that the government must bear the burden of proving dangerousness or flight risk by clear and convincing evidence. The court declined to follow the Ninth Circuit's decision in Rodriguez Diaz v. Garland and the Fourth Circuit's decision in Miranda v. Garland, which reached the opposite conclusion, noting those decisions carry only persuasive authority in the Sixth Circuit. The court acknowledged that the Sixth Circuit has taken up the statutory interpretation question in a related case, Lopez-Campos v. Raycraft, with oral argument held in March 2026 on an expedited schedule.
The court ordered the government to either release J.Z.S. or provide a new bond hearing at which the government bears the burden of proof under the clear and convincing evidence standard, within seven days. A status report is due by April 30, 2026.