I. Introduction
In Oscar Lopez Garcia v. Robert Guadian (consolidated with Juan Jose Rivera v. Robert Guadian), the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit confronted a high-stakes statutory question created by the Government’s July 2025 shift in detention policy: whether noncitizens who entered the United States “without inspection and authorization” years (even decades) ago, and are later arrested inside the country during removal proceedings, must be detained without bond under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A), or instead are detained under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a) with access to an immigration-judge bond hearing.
The petitioners—Oscar Enrique Lopez Garcia (Guatemala; in the U.S. since 1996) and Juan Jose Rivera (El Salvador; in the U.S. since 2005)—were detained by ICE in October 2025 in or near Washington, D.C., held in Virginia, and denied bond hearings because the Government treated them as mandatorily detained “applicant[s] for admission” under § 1225(b)(2)(A). The Government did not contend they were dangerous, flight risks, or criminally covered by mandatory-detention carveouts. Both sought habeas relief in the Eastern District of Virginia, arguing the new reading was unlawful (and unconstitutional as applied) and that § 1226(a) governed their detention.
Against the backdrop of an acknowledged “tsunami” of habeas petitions (Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi) and a deep circuit split, the Fourth Circuit affirmed grants of habeas relief, holding that § 1226(a) governs detention for noncitizens like petitioners who are arrested within the United States after long presence, and that they must be afforded bond hearings.
II. Summary of the Opinion
The majority (Judge Berner, joined by Senior Judge Keenan) held that, properly construed, IIRIRA’s detention framework places long-present noncitizens arrested inside the United States—regardless of unlawful entry—under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a), not 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A). Because § 1226(a) authorizes discretionary detention and allows release on bond after an immigration-judge bond hearing, the petitioners were unlawfully denied those hearings. The court emphasized that § 1225(b)(2)(A) applies only when an immigration officer determines that an “alien seeking admission” is not clearly entitled to admission; that “seeking admission” does work as a limiting phrase; and that the Government’s contrary approach would create surplusage, disrupt statutory structure (including § 1226(c) and the 2025 Laken Riley Act amendments), and raise grave constitutional concerns. The Fourth Circuit thus joined the “overwhelming majority” of circuits rejecting the Government’s new construction.
The opinion also clarified that, at § 1226(a) bond hearings, the petitioner bears the burden under existing process to show he is not a danger or flight risk, citing Miranda v. Garland.
Judge Rushing dissented, reading § 1225(a)(1) as a deeming provision that legally treats unlawful entrants as “applicant[s] for admission,” and reasoning that “applicant for admission” and “alien seeking admission” are synonymous or at least overlapping enough that § 1225(b)(2)(A) mandates detention for petitioners.
III. Analysis
A. Precedents Cited
1. Statutory-interpretation methodology after Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo
The majority framed the task using Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, emphasizing that courts must “use every tool at [their] disposal” to determine the best reading of an unclear statute, rather than deferring to agency interpretations as a default. This framing mattered because the Government’s July 2025 guidance and the BIA’s adoption of that position in Matter of Yajure Hurtado sought to shift a decades-old understanding. By invoking Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, the court signaled that the interpretive question is for the judiciary to resolve through traditional tools (text, structure, context, history, canons), not by administrative say-so.
2. Text-in-context and whole-statute reading
The opinion relied on classic whole-statute authorities: Robinson v. Shell Oil Co. (considering language, specific context, and broader statutory context) and Graham Cnty. Soil & Water Conservation Dist. v. U.S. ex rel. Wilson / Gustafson v. Alloyd Co. (construing statutes, not isolated provisions). Those cases underwrote the majority’s move from the contested phrase “seeking admission” to the INA’s broader architecture: expedited removal (§ 1225(b)(1)), detention of arriving applicants seeking admission (§ 1225(b)(2)), discretionary detention for noncitizens arrested in the interior (§ 1226(a)), and mandatory-criminal carveouts (§ 1226(c)).
3. Canons against surplusage and for meaningful variation
The majority applied the anti-surplusage canon through Williams v. Taylor (quoting United States v. Menasche) and Corley v. United States (quoting Hibbs v. Winn), reinforced by Marx v. Gen. Revenue Corp. on when the canon is strongest. It also invoked S.W. Airlines Co. v. Saxon (via Valladares v. Ray) for the presumption that different words denote different ideas.
These precedents supported the conclusion that treating “applicant for admission” and “alien seeking admission” as synonyms would erase Congress’s choice to add the modifying phrase “seeking admission” in § 1225(b)(2)(A). The Government’s reading, the majority reasoned, would write words out of the statute and flatten distinctions elsewhere.
4. Deeming provisions, legal fictions, and statutory labels
The dispute over whether § 1225(a)(1)’s “shall be deemed ... an applicant for admission” is definitional or deeming drew on Sturgeon v. Frost (deeming provisions can create legal fictions) and the Fourth Circuit’s own Hedin v. Thompson (legal fictions can be limited by context and statutory modification).
The majority used Hedin v. Thompson to argue that even if “applicant for admission” is a legal fiction, Congress did not “deem” interior unlawful entrants to be “seeking admission,” and the added modifier in § 1225(b)(2)(A) (“seeking admission”) must be given effect. The dissent, by contrast, leaned on Sturgeon v. Frost to argue that deeming should be taken robustly: if you are deemed an applicant for admission, you are treated as seeking admission.
5. Immigration-law background: entry/inside-the-country distinctions and due process
The majority grounded the interpretive dispute in longstanding doctrinal distinctions:
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Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei and Zadvydas v. Davis for the “runs throughout immigration law” distinction between those who have “effected an entry” and those at the threshold.
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Yick Wo v. Hopkins and Yamataya v. Fisher / Reno v. Flores for due process protection applying to “persons” within U.S. territory (even if unlawfully present).
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Dep't of Homeland Sec. v. Thuraissigiam (quoting Mezei) to explain the parole “legal fiction” that a paroled person is treated “as if stopped at the border.”
These cases did not directly decide the statutory question but supplied the constitutional and historical baseline that made the Government’s interpretation more constitutionally fraught, motivating the majority’s later reliance on constitutional avoidance.
6. Mandatory detention and the INA’s detention cases
The majority cited Jennings v. Rodriguez for the proposition that § 1226(c) is a carveout from § 1226(a), and Nielsen v. Preap for recognizing § 1226(c) as a “limit on the authority conferred by subsection (a).” Those cases strengthened the idea that § 1226(a) was designed to cover a broad set of removal detainees, with Congress specifying when detention becomes mandatory.
The dissent, in turn, relied on Demore v. Kim and Jennings v. Rodriguez to caution against constitutional-avoidance reasoning untethered to concrete due process holdings, emphasizing that detention pending removal is often constitutionally permissible.
7. Separation of powers and the primacy of Congress
The majority placed the case in the frame of congressional primacy over admission and exclusion, quoting Arizona v. United States and using that foundation to scrutinize whether the Executive’s policy shift in 2025 could be squared with Congress’s enacted structure.
8. The “elephants in mouseholes” line of cases and skepticism of sudden agency “discoveries”
To reject a reading with sweeping, system-transforming consequences, the majority invoked Whitman v. Am. Trucking Ass'ns., Inc. (“Congress does not ... hide elephants in mouseholes”), Util. Air Regul. Grp. v. EPA (skepticism when an agency claims to discover an unheralded power), and Learning Res., Inc. v. Trump as further support for requiring clarity before accepting massive regulatory disruption.
9. Constitutional avoidance
The majority relied on INS v. St. Cyr and Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority to apply constitutional avoidance: when a statute is ambiguous and one reading raises serious constitutional problems, adopt a fairly possible alternative that avoids them. The avoidance move was bolstered by the court’s portrayal of the Government’s interpretation as authorizing “the single largest mass detention” in U.S. history based on ambiguous text.
10. Fourth Circuit standards and procedural reminders
The court applied Wolfe v. Clarke for habeas review standards (de novo for law; clear error for facts). It also cited Miranda v. Garland for the mechanics of § 1226(a) bond hearings and to correct the district court’s inversion of the burden of proof.
11. Circuit-split authorities on the precise question
The majority located itself in a rapidly forming inter-circuit debate:
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Circuits agreeing with the Fourth Circuit: Guerrero Orellana v. Moniz; Barbosa da Cunha v. Freden; Buele Morocho v. Warden Philadelphia FDC; Lopez-Campos v. Raycraft; Cirrus Rojas v. Olson; Rodriguez Vazquez v. Bostock; Santillan Quiroz v. Mullin; Hernandez Alvarez v. Warden, Fed. Det. Ctr. Miami.
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Circuits adopting the Government’s reading: Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi; Avila v. Bondi.
These cases functioned less as binding precedent than as persuasive confirmation that the statutory text is genuinely contestable, and that the consequences of either reading are nationwide.
12. Historical cautionary cases in the conclusion
The majority’s concluding rhetoric drew on Wong Wing v. United States (Chinese hard-labor detention under the Geary Act), United States v. Hohri (Japanese internment litigation), and Trump v. Hawaii (repudiating Korematsu “in the court of history”) to emphasize the judiciary’s role in resisting unjust mass detention. These cases did not control the statutory meaning, but they framed the magnitude of the Government’s claimed detention authority as a reason to demand textual clarity.
B. Legal Reasoning
1. The core interpretive hinge: “seeking admission”
Both sides accepted that § 1226(a) on its face covers “an alien” arrested and detained pending a removal decision, with bond eligibility unless § 1226(c) mandates detention. The Government argued that § 1225(b)(2)(A) displaces § 1226(a) for all “applicant[s] for admission,” including interior unlawful entrants, because under § 1225(a)(1) such persons are “deemed ... an applicant for admission,” and (the Government contended) applicants for admission necessarily are “seeking admission.”
The majority acknowledged that § 1225(b)(2)(A) clearly applies to “applicant[s] for admission” and that petitioners fit that label under § 1225(a)(1). But it held that § 1225(b)(2)(A) contains an additional operative limiter: detention is mandatory only when the officer determines that an “alien seeking admission” is not clearly entitled to be admitted. Because “seeking admission” is not defined, the statute’s best reading must be derived using the canons, structure, history, and consequences.
2. Anti-surplusage and meaningful variation: Congress used two phrases for a reason
The majority’s first major move was linguistic: if “alien seeking admission” simply meant “applicant for admission,” the extra phrase “seeking admission” would do no work. The court treated that as a serious defect under the anti-surplusage canon, and it rejected the Government’s reading because it effectively collapses Congress’s two separate phrases into one.
In contrast, the majority’s reading gives “seeking admission” meaning by making it describe a subset of “applicant[s] for admission”—those actively in the process of attempting to secure lawful entry (typically at or near the border or port-of-entry context), rather than people long inside the country now defending against removal and pursuing other forms of relief.
3. The whole-statute framework: multiple “applicant” statuses but different procedural tracks
The majority’s second move was structural: it presented §§ 1225 and 1226 as a graduated detention system. Under this view:
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§ 1225(b)(1) (expedited removal) and § 1225(b)(2) address recent arrivals and the border-adjacent admission process.
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§ 1226(a) governs interior arrests during the ordinary § 1229a removal process, preserving discretionary detention and bond hearings unless Congress has specified mandatory detention in § 1226(c).
The majority reinforced this by explaining that noncitizens may seek many forms of relief or lawful status other than “admission” as a statutory concept (citing Sanchez v. Mayorkas for the distinction between lawful status and admission). Thus, long-present individuals in removal proceedings are not necessarily “seeking admission” even though they are “applicants for admission” for certain INA purposes.
4. Interaction with § 1226(c) and the Laken Riley Act: avoiding statutory collapse
A pivotal statutory-structure argument was that the Government’s interpretation would make major parts of § 1226(c) (and especially the Laken Riley Act’s new § 1226(c)(1)(E)) largely redundant, because the Government’s reading would already mandate detention without bond for all non-admitted noncitizens, including those who commit enumerated crimes. The majority treated this as a “fatal defect,” reasoning that Congress would not have recently amended § 1226(c) to add new mandatory detention categories if § 1225(b)(2)(A) already swept them in.
5. Historical practice and contemporaneous regulation: the “universal” understanding
The majority treated longstanding interpretation as a powerful confirmatory tool: for nearly three decades, the Executive Branch applied § 1226 to interior unlawful entrants and reserved § 1225(b)(2)(A) for those at or near the admission process. The 1997 rulemaking record (62 Fed. Reg. 10323) was used as particularly probative because it was “roughly contemporaneous” with IIRIRA and consistent across administrations. That administrative practice did not control the meaning, but it supported the view that the Government’s 2025 pivot was not a natural reading silently embedded in the statute.
6. Consequences-based canons: “elephants in mouseholes” and constitutional avoidance
The majority emphasized the scale of consequences: if § 1225(b)(2)(A) applied to all long-present unlawful entrants, Congress would have mandated potentially unprecedented mass detention without bond for millions, yet the statute lacks a clear statement and Congress historically worried even about far smaller detention expansions. This set up the “elephants in mouseholes” point: such a sweeping transformation should not be inferred from ambiguous phrasing.
The majority then invoked constitutional avoidance: because the Government’s reading would substantially expand mandatory detention without individualized bond review for a large population living in the United States, and because due process protections apply to “persons” within the territory, the court selected the interpretation that avoids raising serious Fifth Amendment questions.
7. The dissent’s competing textual theory
Judge Rushing’s dissent treated § 1225(a)(1) as a robust deeming provision that creates a legal posture, not a mere label: if unlawful entrants are “deemed” applicants for admission, they must be treated as people requesting lawful entry (hence “seeking admission”). The dissent also argued that some redundancy between “applicant for admission” and “seeking admission” is tolerable, citing Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, Rimini Street, Inc. v. Oracle USA, Inc., and Barton v. Barr, and that the majority’s reading creates worse surplusage by hollowing out § 1225(a)(1)’s practical effect.
In short: the majority read “seeking admission” as an operative limiter; the dissent read § 1225(a)(1) as legally supplying that element for interior unlawful entrants.
C. Impact
1. Immediate operational effect in the Fourth Circuit
Within the Fourth Circuit, DHS/DOJ cannot categorically deny bond hearings to long-present noncitizens detained in the interior solely because they entered without inspection. Absent a § 1226(c) mandatory-detention category, such detainees must be processed under § 1226(a) and afforded an immigration-judge bond hearing under the governing regulations (8 C.F.R. §§ 236.1(d), 1003.19, 1236.1(d)).
2. Reinforcement of the majority side of a national circuit split
The Fourth Circuit’s alignment with the First, Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits deepens the pressure for Supreme Court resolution, given the Fifth and Eighth Circuits’ contrary rulings in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi and Avila v. Bondi. The split has direct detention-capacity, fiscal, and liberty consequences and is likely to recur in high volumes through habeas petitions.
3. Constraining executive “reinterpretations” after Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo
The opinion is also a signal case about interpretive authority after Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo: agencies may change policy, but courts will demand a best reading grounded in statutory text, structure, and history, particularly when an agency’s new reading claims vast latent power that was not previously exercised or recognized.
4. Potential downstream litigation
Likely next-wave issues include: (i) the outer boundary of “seeking admission” for non-border contexts (e.g., certain pending admission applications); (ii) the relationship between bond, parole under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(d)(5)(A), and detention authority; (iii) challenges to detention length under due process theories, even where initial authority exists; and (iv) renewed statutory amendments by Congress in response to the split.