The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to detain people arrested in its immigration crackdown without bond hearings, even if they’ve lived in the United States for years. The justices could take up that dispute, along with cases over prediction-market regulation and a Texas requirement to display the Ten Commandments in public schools, as they consider additions to the new term’s docket.
Detention and the reach of federal law
The administration’s position relies on an interpretation adopted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year. ICE said non-U.S. citizens already living in the country—not just people arriving at the border—qualify as “applicants for admission” under immigration law. Federal law requires detention for people in that category while their cases proceed in immigration courts, and bars them from bond hearings.
That reading broke with a long-standing interpretation of immigration law. After the Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the Justice Department, adopted it, immigration judges employed by the department began ordering mandatory detention. The administration is asking the Supreme Court to decide whether it can keep enforcing the policy without giving detained people a chance to seek bond.
Kemal Hepsen, an immigration lawyer in Texas, said federal appeals courts had considered the question and ruled against the administration in 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.
The court’s nine-month term starts next Monday. Its first arguments will address whether oil companies including ExxonMobil can be held financially liable for helping drive climate change. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority, typically hears arguments in about 70 cases each term and has already agreed to hear about two dozen. The justices were expected to announce some decisions this week on whether to take additional cases.
States, markets and federal authority
A possible case involving prediction markets including Kalshi and Polymarket is also before the court. Those markets have seen explosive growth. Appeals involving Kalshi, Crypto.com and Robinhood are pending. The Trump administration has backed prediction markets in the litigation. Polymarket received an investment last year from a venture capital firm backed by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son.
The operators call their “event contracts” financial derivatives that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency, should regulate exclusively. A bipartisan coalition of states argues that sports-related offerings amount to gambling and should fall under state sports-betting laws. Federal appeals courts disagree. If the Supreme Court ultimately classifies prediction markets as gambling, the platforms could face a patchwork of bans, taxes, licensing regimes and criminal statutes.
Daniel Wallach, a sports lawyer in Florida who has followed the litigation, described the range of parties with an interest in the outcome. “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,” Wallach said.
Religion 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 biblical Ten Commandments in classrooms. The families appealed after the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law didn’t violate the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion or its protections for free exercise.
“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, writing for the 5th Circuit, said the Texas law “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 the legal framework used in that decision in a 2022 ruling involving a football coach at a public high school in Washington state.
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. Louisiana’s law also faces legal challenges. In February, the 5th Circuit allowed the measure to take effect but said it needed more information about implementation before ruling on its constitutionality. Louisiana wants the Supreme Court to consider its law if the justices take up the Texas case.