The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let it detain people arrested in the president’s immigration crackdown without bond hearings, including people who have lived in the United States for years. The request is one of several cases the justices could add to a docket that also includes disputes over prediction-market regulation and a Texas law requiring Ten Commandments displays in public schools.
Kemal Hepsen, an immigration lawyer in Texas, said federal appeals courts had considered the detention question and the administration had lost 9 of 11 decisions. “On the statutory question, there’s nothing left to percolate, and the alternative is a country where whether you can get bond depends on which state ICE drives you to,” Hepsen said.
Detention without bond
Last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the position that non-U.S. citizens already living in the country qualify as “applicants for admission,” a category previously applied to people arriving at the border. Federal law requires detention for applicants for admission while their cases proceed in immigration courts and bars them from bond hearings.
The new interpretation broke with a long-standing reading of immigration law. After the Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the Justice Department, adopted ICE’s position, immigration judges employed by the department began ordering mandatory detention. The administration now wants the Supreme Court to let the policy continue.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. It typically hears arguments in about 70 cases each term and has already agreed to hear about two dozen. Its new term begins next Monday with arguments over whether oil companies including ExxonMobil can be held financially liable for helping drive climate change. The justices were expected to announce decisions this week on whether to take additional cases.
Markets and competing regulators
A separate group of appeals concerns prediction markets including Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Robinhood. The companies have expanded into prediction markets, which have experienced explosive growth. The Trump administration has backed the platforms in litigation.
The operators call their “event contracts” financial derivatives that should fall exclusively under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency. A bipartisan coalition of states argues that sports-related contracts amount to gambling and should instead face state sports-betting laws. Federal appeals courts disagree. If the Supreme Court rules that prediction markets are gambling, the platforms could face a patchwork of bans, taxes, licensing regimes and criminal statutes.
Polymarket secured an investment last year from a venture capital firm backed by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son. The dispute puts state regulators and federal agencies at odds over a fast-growing market, alongside online betting companies, casinos and financial exchanges.
“The stakeholder interest in this controversy encompasses 50 states, hundreds of Native American tribes, hundreds of casinos, multi-billion-dollar financial exchanges, online sports betting companies and the federal government,” said Daniel Wallach, a sports lawyer in Florida who has followed the litigation. “This probably is the most expansive and significant group of stakeholders that you could imagine for almost any case.”
State power in public schools
Several Texas families, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, have asked the Supreme Court to strike down the state’s 2025 law requiring public elementary and high schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. They appealed after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the measure did not violate the First Amendment’s religion clauses.
“Our nation’s bedrock principle of separating church and state means that families and faith communities — not politicians — get to decide what role religion plays in children’s lives,” Chloe Kempf, a lawyer at the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement.
Judge Kyle Duncan wrote for the 5th Circuit that the Texas law “does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis or imams.” He added: “It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason.”
The Supreme Court struck down a similar Kentucky law in its 1980 decision, Stone v. Graham. The current court has taken an expansive view of religious freedom and discarded, in a 2022 ruling, the legal framework used in that earlier decision. That later ruling involved a public high school football coach in Washington state who faced suspension for refusing to stop leading Christian prayers with players on the field after games.
Republican-led states in the South have led efforts to require classroom displays. Louisiana passed a requirement in 2024, followed by Arkansas, Texas and Alabama. Critics call the laws part of rising Christian nationalism. Louisiana’s measure also faces legal challenges; in February, the 5th Circuit allowed it to take effect while seeking more information about implementation before ruling on its constitutionality.