Ian Millhiser

And the way they're doing that is reinterpreting old laws and trying to apply them in a different way.

Then came the second Trump administration, now implementing this mandatory detention policy, saying that with very few exceptions, when a migrant is apprehended in these ICE enforcement operations, the government is compelled to detain them without bond as they fight their deportation.

And courts around the country have been rejecting this over and over hundreds and hundreds of times.

However,

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a very conservative panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled on Friday that the administration's interpretation of those old laws was correct and that they could continue this mass detention campaign on top of their mass deportation campaign.

What was the Fifth Circuit's reasoning here?

So it's somewhat nuanced and complicated, but the idea is whether you treat people who have lived in the United States maybe for decades, no criminal records, people who have built lives here, you can treat them as though they have just arrived in the country, essentially call them arriving aliens is the term in the law.

Wow.

And again, no previous administration has interpreted it this way, but it is a convoluted aspect of these old laws.

And, you know, then the Fifth Circuit said that what this administration is doing may be different, but just because they're exercising power in a different way doesn't mean it's wrong.

And they backed them up.

OK, so the Trump administration says we're going to interpret this law differently.

Do we do we know how the Trump administration landed on the notion that they could interpret the law differently?

Yeah.

I don't know necessarily how the deliberations played out, but they did implement this through – it's very discreet.

It was a July 8th policy memo from ICE's acting director, Todd Lyons, that basically said the old way is wrong.

We're doing it a new way.

And since that day, we've seen this slow explosion of these cases.

And now it's not slow anymore.

It's all over the country.