Opinion ID: 4523207
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Jennings’s Rejection of a Six-Month Bond

Text: Hearing Requirement for Aliens Detained Pursuant to § 1226(a) Does Not Undercut Diouf II’s Construction of § 1231(a)(6) The merits of the Government’s clear irreconcilability challenge to Diouf II’s bond hearing requirement ultimately come down to Jennings’s rejection of construing § 1226(a) to contain a periodic bond hearing requirement. Reviewing the Court’s actual reasoning in Jennings, including with respect to all the provisions at issue there, we cannot agree that Jennings’s treatment of § 1226(a) on this issue undercuts Diouf II. In the decision that Jennings reversed, we used the phrase “periodic bond hearing” to refer to bond hearings every six months. Rodriguez III, 804 F.3d at 1089. The Court used the phrase “periodic bond hearing” to encompass a bond hearing held initially at six months of detention. Jennings, 138 S. Ct. at 850–51 (“The Court of Appeals held that aliens detained under the provisions at issue must be given periodic bond hearings, and the dissent agrees. . . . But the dissent draws that 6-month limitation out of thin air. . . [N]othing in any of the relevant provisions imposes a 6- month time limit on detention without the possibility of bail.”). Even if we apply the Court’s definition, we fail to see how Jennings undercuts Diouf II’s construction of § 1231(a)(6) to require a bond hearing after the government detains an alien pursuant to this statutory provision for six months and whose release or removal is not imminent. 44 ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR Similar to our observation in the discussion of the Government’s constitutional avoidance argument, we observe here that Jennings repeatedly qualified that its rejection of a “periodic bond hearing” requirement applied to the statutory provisions at issue there. Jennings, 138 S. Ct. at 836 (“All parties appear to agree that the text of [§§ 1225(b), 1226(a), 1226(c)], when read most naturally, does not give detained aliens the right to periodic bond hearings during the course of their detention.”); id. (“[T]he Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that detained aliens have a statutory right to periodic bond hearings under the provisions at issue.” (emphasis added)); id. at 844 (“[A] series of textual signals distinguishes the provisions at issue in this case from Zadvydas’s interpretation of § 1231(a)(6).” (emphasis added)); id. at 850–51 (“The Court of Appeals held that aliens detained under the provisions at issue must be given periodic bond hearings, and the dissent agrees. . . . But the dissent draws that 6-month limitation out of thin air. However broad its interpretation of the words ‘detain’ and ‘custody,’ nothing in any of the relevant provisions imposes a 6-month time limit on detention without the possibility of bail.” (emphasis added)); id. at 851 (“Because the Court of Appeals erroneously concluded that periodic bond hearings are required under the immigration provisions at issue here . . .” (emphasis added)). The Court’s repeated use of this language strongly suggests that we should not read the Court’s rejection of a six-month bond hearing requirement for § 1226(a) as undercutting Diouf II’s construction of § 1231(a)(6) to require a bond hearing after six months of detention when an alien’s release or removal is not imminent. We find that conclusion inescapable when we look at Jennings’s careful focus on the text of the provisions at issue there and the ways in which they differ from § 1231(a)(6) ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR 45 and thus whether Zadvydas’s reasoning could apply to the other provisions at all. In rejecting our constructions of §§ 1225(b)(1) and (b)(2) to contain an implicit six-month time limit, the Court underscored that Zadvydas applied the canon to § 1231(a)(6) based on ambiguity in the provision’s “may be detained” language and because the provision contained no limitation on the permissible length of detention. Jennings, 138 S. Ct. at 843 (noting that in contrast to §§ 1225(b)(1) and (b)(2), “Congress left the permissible length of detention under §1231(a)(6) unclear.”); Zadvydas, 533 U.S. at 697. Rather than allow the government to subject an alien to potentially indefinite detention, as Jennings explained, Zadvydas construed § 1231(a)(6) to hold that “an alien who has been ordered removed may not be detained beyond ‘a period reasonably necessary to secure removal’” with “six months a[s] a presumptively reasonable period.” Jennings, 138 S. Ct. at 843 (quoting Zadvydas, 533 U.S. at 699 and citing Zadvydas, 533 U.S. at 701). As the Court explained, detention pursuant to §§ 1225(b)(1) or (b)(2) presented no such issue based on the clear text of those provisions. Id. at 843–44. The Court’s analysis of § 1226(a) in Jennings was sparse. But the Court’s reasoning in its discussion of §§ 1225(b)(1) and (b)(2) applies to § 1226(a) as well. Contrary to the Government’s singular focus on §§ 1226(a) and 1231(a)(6)’s use of the “may be detained” language, the provisions are materially distinct in the meaning of this language. Unlike § 1231(a)(6), “§ 1226(a) authorizes the Attorney General to arrest and detain an alien ‘pending a decision on whether the alien is to be removed from the United States.’” Id. at 847 (quoting 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a)). Thus, as a textual matter, discretionary detention pursuant to § 1226(a) has an end point, unlike discretionary detention pursuant to § 1231(a)(6) absent a limiting construction. 46 ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR Pursuant to the Court’s own reasoning elsewhere in Jennings, the six-month presumptive time limitation that Zadvydas read into § 1231(a)(6) to address potentially indefinite detention pursuant to that provision does not “fairly apply” to detention pursuant to § 1226(a). This material difference between §§ 1226(a) and 1231(a)(6) prevents us from concluding that Jennings’s rejection of construing § 1226(a) to require a bond hearing at six months applies to § 1231(a)(6). 13 Unlike with any of the other immigration detention statutes at issue in Jennings, Diouf II concerned the statutory provision at issue in Zadvydas and adopted a definition of prolonged detention that coincides with the presumptive six-month time limit that Zadvydas read into that provision based on § 1231(a)(6)’s textual ambiguity. Compare Zadvydas, 533 U.S. at 701 with Diouf II, 634 F.3d at 1091–92 & n.13. Further echoing 13 The dissent’s analysis proceeds on the mistaken assumption that there are no material differences between §§ 1226(a) and 1231(a)(6). Dissent at 61–62 n.2. In doing so, the dissent does not engage with Jennings’s reasoning and analysis regarding the statutory provisions at issue there. Moreover, the dissent commits the converse of the error that led the Court to reject our application of the canon to the other immigration detention statutes. Dissent at 67 (contending that Jennings rejected the “scaffolding upon which we had erected” additional procedural protections for § 1226(a) detainees.). Whereas as we had ignored the textual differences amongst the immigration detention statutes to apply the canon to those statutes in the wake of the Court’s application of the canon to § 1231(a)(6) in Zadvydas, the dissent uncritically applies Jennings’s limited analysis concerning § 1226(a) to Diouf II’s construction of § 1231(a)(6) despite the ways in which Jennings’s reasoning shows that these provisions are materially distinct. Jennings’s actual analysis prevents us from finding clearly irreconcilability here. Cf. Murray, 934 F.3d at 1106 n.6 (finding clear irreconcilability when there were “no meaningful textual difference[s]” in the statutory text at issue there and the different provisions considered by two intervening decisions). ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR 47 Zadvydas, Diouf II also qualified that its construction of § 1231(a)(6) to require a bond hearing does not apply if an alien’s release or removal is imminent. Compare Zadvydas, 533 U.S. at 701 (“[A]n alien may be held in confinement until it has been determined that there is no significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future.”) with Diouf II, 634 F.3d at 1092 n.13. Although Jennings rejected our court’s reliance on Zadvydas to construe the other immigration detention statutes and rejected construing § 1226(a) to require a sixmonth bond hearing, we cannot find in Jennings’s reasoning a rationale that clearly undercuts Diouf II’s six-month bond hearing requirement for aliens detained pursuant to § 1231(a)(6). Contrary to the dissent’s view, Jennings shows that Zadvydas’s construction of § 1231(a)(6) provides an “arguable statutory foundation,” 138 S. Ct. at 842, for Diouf II’s six-month bond hearing requirement that is entirely absent from the other immigration detention provisions. 14 14 The dissent posits that “we have given short shrift to” the motivations underlying the Court’s decision in Zadvydas, specifically that the decision “was largely motivated by the fact that the possibility of removal of the aliens before it was truly remote because the countries to which they could be removed were highly unlikely to accept them at any time in the foreseeable future.” Dissent at 63 n.4. That is incorrect. As the Court has instructed, Zadvydas’s construction of § 1231(a)(6) applies to all aliens detained pursuant to § 1231(a)(6) even if “the constitutional concerns that influenced our statutory construction in Zadvydas are not present for aliens” in other circumstances. Clark, 543 U.S. at 380. And the Court has rejected the notion that statutory ambiguity disappears based on the circumstances of a given alien detained pursuant to § 1231(a)(6). “Be that as it may, it cannot justify giving the same detention provision a different meaning when such aliens are involved. It is not at all unusual to give a statute’s ambiguous 48 ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR In its reply brief, the Government makes much of that fact that Jennings called into question Zadvydas’s reading of § 1231(a)(6) as a “notably generous application of the canon.” 138 S. Ct. at 843. But the Court did not overrule Zadvydas; its statutory analysis, including application of the canon, remain intact. 15 We therefore cannot conclude that Diouf II’s construction of § 1231(a)(6) to require a bond hearing after six months of detention runs afoul of Jennings. We understand that the Government strenuously disagrees with Diouf II’s bond hearing requirement as inconsistent with the habeas framework that Zadvydas outlined and with the Government’s post-Zadvydas regulations. That disagreement, however, has nothing to do with whether Jennings, by its own terms, undercuts Diouf II’s construction of § 1231(a)(6). Accordingly, we reject the Government’s second argument. language a limiting construction called for by one of the statute’s applications, even though other of the statute’s applications, standing alone, would not support the same limitation.” Id. (emphasis in original). 15 In failing to account for Jennings’s reasoning regarding Zadvydas and Diouf II’s reliance on Zadvydas’s reading of § 1231(a)(6), the dissent characterizes the textual ambiguity in § 1231(a)(6) that Zadvydas identified as a “narrow ambiguity.” Dissent at 63–64. We know of no basis in our clear irreconcilability jurisprudence that would allow us to overrule the prior decision of a three-judge panel on the basis of a reason that appears nowhere in the intervening authority’s decision. Neither Jennings, nor Zadvydas said anything about the scope of the ambiguity in § 1231(a)(6) that Zadvydas identified. Contrary to the dissent’s view, Jennings’s questioning of Zadvydas’s particular application of the canon to that ambiguity—the adoption of a six-month time limitation that Jennings rejected as a matter of statutory construction for the other immigration detention statutes—says nothing about the ambiguity’s scope. ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR 49 C. Diouf II’s Reliance on Casas-Castrillon As a final matter, the Government contends that Diouf II is clearly irreconcilable with Jennings based on the interrelated nature of our decisions in Casas-Castrillon, Diouf II, and Rodriguez III. The Government’s argument is as follows: (1) Diouf II extended Casas-Castrillon’s construction of § 1226(a) to individuals subject to prolonged detention pursuant to § 1231(a)(6), (2) Rodriguez III also applied Casas-Castrillon’s construction of § 1226(a), (3) Jennings reversed Rodriguez III, and, thus, by implication, (4) Jennings and Diouf II are clearly irreconcilable. We reject these arguments for two reasons. First, we think that the Government misreads both Casas-Castrillon and Jennings. As we have explained, Jennings did not invalidate construing § 1226(a) to authorize a bond hearing at all, but rather rejected construing § 1226(a) to require a bond hearing at six months in addition to the government’s existing bond hearing regulations. More importantly here, Casas-Castrillon did not construe § 1226(a) in the manner that the Court rejected in Jennings. Casas-Castrillon applied the canon of constitutional avoidance to construe § 1226(a)’s authorization for release of an alien on bond as requiring an individualized bond hearing when an alien is subject to prolonged detention. 535 F.3d at 951. By the time our court decided Rodriguez III, we had applied Diouf II’s definition of prolonged detention as detention lasting longer than six months to § 1226(a), which transformed Casas-Castrillon’s bond hearing requirement into a six-month bond hearing requirement. See Rodriguez II, 715 F.3d at 1139 (“Diouf II strongly suggested that immigration detention becomes prolonged at the six-month mark regardless of the authorizing statute. . . . Even if Diouf II does not squarely 50 ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR hold that detention always becomes prolonged at six months, that conclusion is consistent with the reasoning of Zadvydas, Demore, Casas[-Castrillon], and Diouf II, and we so hold.”); see also Rodriguez III, 804 F.3d at 1078 & n.7. By its terms, Jennings invalidates that aspect of our case law construing § 1226(a), but does not go further. 16 Second, even if we concluded here that Jennings overruled Casas-Castrillon, we do not see how that could undercut Diouf II entirely. Diouf II’s construction of § 1231(a)(6) did not rest solely on its purported extension of Casas-Castrillon to aliens detained pursuant to § 1231(a)(6). Diouf II, 634 F.3d at 1086. As we have explained, Diouf II considered a number of arguments particular to § 1231(a)(6) itself that could not have applied to Casas-Castrillon’s analysis of § 1226(a). Id. at 1086–92. More critically, as Jennings’s reasoning makes clear, Casas-Castrillon concerned a statutory provision that is materially different from the provision at issue in Diouf II. Thus, we conclude that Diouf II can stand irrespective of its reliance on Casas- 16 The dissent contends that in rejecting the Government’s challenge to Diouf II based on its argument here, we have suggested that “some of Casas-Castrillon survives Jennings[.]” Dissent at 68 n.14. Our response is twofold. For one, we have done nothing more than explain why we think the Government’s challenge to Diouf II based on Jennings is wrong. We have not decided what specifically remains of CasasCastrillon’s statutory holding after Jennings. Second, we do not take issue with the dissent’s correct understanding that Jennings invalidated procedural protections that go beyond what the government’s regulations provide. Id. However, we otherwise part ways with the dissent’s reading of Jennings. As we have explained, Jennings’s approval of the government’s regulations to provide bond hearings for aliens detained pursuant to § 1226(a) necessarily assumes that § 1226(a) can be plausibly read to authorize such hearings in the first place. ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR 51 Castrillon.17 Because we reject this final argument, we conclude that the Government has not shown that Diouf II is clearly irreconcilable with Jennings. D. Additional Support for Diouf II After Jennings Apart from rejecting the Government’s arguments, we find additional support for our conclusion that Diouf II is not clearly irreconcilable with Jennings based on the Third Circuit’s decision in Guerrero-Sanchez v. Warden York County Prison, 905 F.3d 208 (3d Cir. 2018). In Guerrero-Sanchez, the Third Circuit considered whether the government could subject the alien petitioner in that case to prolonged detention without providing an individualized bond hearing. The Third Circuit first determined that the alien—who had a reinstated removal order and was detained pending his pursuit of withholdingonly relief from removal—was subject to detention pursuant to § 1231(a)(6). 18 Id. at 213–19. Having located the 17 The dissent’s reliance on Nunez-Reyes v. Holder, 646 F.3d 684, 690 (9th Cir. 2011) (en banc) misses the mark. For one, Nunez-Reyes involved our court sitting en banc, not a three-judge panel determining whether an earlier circuit precedent was clearly irreconcilable with the decision of an intervening authority. We are faced with different constraints compared with our court sitting en banc. Second, unlike in Nunez-Reyes, there is no single “rule” on which Diouf II relied that would warrant a conclusion that Jennings’s rejection of any aspect of Casas-Castrillon necessarily would invalidate Diouf II in its entirety. 18 We recognize that there is a circuit split on the issue of whether an alien subject to a reinstated removal order who pursues withholdingonly relief is subject to detention pursuant to § 1226(a) or § 1231(a)(6). Both our court and the Third Circuit treat such detention as authorized pursuant to § 1231(a)(6). Guerrero-Sanchez, 905 F.3d at 213–19; Padilla-Ramirez, 882 F.3d at 830–32. In contrast, the Second and Fourth 52 ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR government’s detention authority in § 1231(a)(6), the Third Circuit considered whether the petitioner was entitled to a bond hearing at all. Id. at 219. To resolve that issue, the Third Circuit considered, in relevant part, Zadvydas, Jennings, and Diouf II. Rejecting the government’s argument there that “Zadvydas resolves the only ambiguity in the text of § 1231(a)(6),” id. at 220, the Third Circuit reasoned that Zadvydas did “not explicitly preclude courts from construing § 1231(a)(6) to include additional procedural protections during the statutorily authorized detention period, should those protections be necessary to avoid detention that could raise different constitutional concerns,” id. at 221 (emphasis in original). Finding that the petitioner’s 637-day detention without bond raised serious constitutional concerns, id., the Third Circuit declined to address whether the petitioner’s continued confinement violated the Due Process Clause. Id. at 221, 223. Instead, the court asked whether the canon of constitutional avoidance might sustain a reading of § 1231(a)(6) that would require the provision of a bond hearing. Id. at 223. The Third Circuit acknowledged Jennings’s discussion regarding the proper invocation of the canon and Jennings’s holding that the canon could not be applied to “other provisions in the INA” that use the phrase “shall detain.” Id. (“We . . . invoke the canon of constitutional avoidance so long as ‘the statute is found to be susceptible of more than one construction.’ (quoting Jennings, 138 S. Ct. at 842)). Turning to § 1231(a)(6)’s text and alluding to Zadvydas, the Circuits treat such detention as authorized pursuant to § 1226(a). Guzman Chavez v. Hott, 940 F.3d 867, 880−82 (4th Cir. 2019); Guerra v. Shanahan, 831 F.3d 59, 64 (2d Cir. 2016). ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR 53 Third Circuit noted that the statute’s use of the phrase “may be detained” “invites us to apply the canon of constitutional avoidance[.]” Id. at 223–24. “In order to avoid determining whether the petitioner’s detention violates the Due Process Clause,” the Third Circuit expressly “adopt[ed] the Ninth Circuit’s limiting construction of § 1231(a)(6) that ‘an alien facing prolonged detention under [that provision] is entitled to a bond hearing before an immigration judge and is entitled to be released from detention unless the government establishes that the alien poses a risk of flight or a danger to the community.’” Id. at 224 (quoting Diouf II, 634 F.3d at 1092). The Third Circuit also adopted our clear and convincing evidence standard set forth in Singh. Id. at n.12 (“The Government must meet its burden in such bond hearings by clear and convincing evidence. (citing Singh, 638 F.3d at 1203–04)). The Third Circuit’s express and reasoned adoption of Diouf II even after Jennings shows that we do not break new ground in concluding that Diouf II is not clearly irreconcilable with Jennings. Ignoring Guerrero-Sanchez, the Government quotes from the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Hamama v. Homan, 912 F.3d 869 (6th Cir. 2018), without any argument about how that case should affect our clear irreconcilability analysis here. To the extent the Government intended to argue that Hamama should change our analysis, we reject that argument. In Hamama, the Sixth Circuit vacated a district court’s class-wide preliminary injunction concerning §§ 1226(c) and 1231(a)(6) detention claims, pursuant to which the government was required to provide class members with individualized bond hearings. Id. at 873–74. With respect to those claims, the Sixth Circuit determined that 8 U.S.C. § 1252(f)(1), a statute that prohibits federal courts other than 54 ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR the Supreme Court from enjoining the operation of §§ 1221– 31 except with respect to an individual alien, barred jurisdiction over class-wide injunctive relief there. Id. at 877. In rejecting the petitioners’ argument that they sought injunctive relief pursuant to a statutory construction of the relevant detention statutes, the Sixth Circuit determined that “Jennings foreclosed any statutory interpretation that would lead to what Petitioners want.” Id. at 879. In the Sixth Circuit’s view, “the district court . . . created out of thin air a requirement for bond hearings that does not exist in the statute; and adopted new standards that the government must meet at the bond hearings.” Id. at 879–80. Hamama does not compel a different conclusion about whether Diouf II is clearly irreconcilable with Jennings for two reasons. First, despite remarking that “the Jennings Court chastised the Ninth Circuit for ‘erroneously conclud[ing] that periodic bond hearings are required under the immigration provisions at issue here,” the Sixth Circuit extended Jennings to § 1231 without any analysis regarding whether Jennings’s reasoning fairly applies to that provision. Id. at 879 (quoting Jennings, 138 S. Ct. at 850) (emphasis added). Although we do not question Hamama’s determination insofar as it concerns the provisions actually at issue in Jennings, we cannot agree with the uncritical extension of Jennings to § 1231(a)(6), particularly given our foregoing analysis of Jennings. Second, unlike GuerreroSanchez, Hamama neither acknowledged, nor grappled with our decision in Diouf II. Therefore, we do not find Hamama to have any persuasive value here in determining whether we remain bound by Diouf II even after Jennings. The dissent takes issue with our reliance on GuerreroSanchez. Dissent at 63–64 & n.5. Yet, in so doing, the dissent errs by mistaking the clear irreconcilability inquiry ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR 55 that confronts us with an invitation to opine on how we would decide the statutory construction question that Diouf II resolved. 19 To be clear, our reliance on Guerrero-Sanchez concerns whether we may apply Diouf II even after Jennings. In determining whether a prior circuit precedent is clearly irreconcilable with an intervening authority’s decision, we have looked to how other circuits have addressed the issue in light of the intervening decision. See Murray, 934 F.3d at 1107 (observing that the court’s clear irreconcilability conclusion “comport[ed] with the decisions of all of our sister circuits that have considered this question after” the Supreme Court’s Gross and Nassar decisions); In re Zappos.com, Inc., 888 F.3d 1020, 1026 n.6 (9th Cir. 2018) (noting that the panel’s conclusion that earlier circuit precedent was not clearly irreconcilable with an intervening Supreme Court decision was “consistent” with sister circuit decisions to have considered the issue). Guerrero-Sanchez is the only reasoned decision of another circuit addressing the relationship between Diouf II’s construction of § 1231(a)(6) and Jennings, and it determined that Jennings does not undercut Diouf II’s construction. We therefore respectfully disagree with the dissent. 19 The dissent asserts that we and Guerrero-Sanchez “mistakenly perceive[] the narrow ambiguity in § 1231(a)(6) identified by Zadvydas” to justify Diouf II’s construction of § 1231(a)(6). Dissent 63–64. We have already explained that the dissent’s characterization of the ambiguity that Zadvydas identified is not justified by Jennings or Zadvydas. We otherwise note that the dissent’s view contravenes how at least one other circuit understood Zadvydas prior to Jennings. See Hernandez-Carrera v. Carlson, 547 F.3d 1237, 1249 (10th Cir. 2008) (“In Zadvydas, the Supreme Court did not purport to ‘resolve’ the statutory ambiguity in § 1231(a)(6) once and for all. . . . In no way, . . . did the Court signal that its interpretation was the only reasonable construction of § 1231(a)(6).”). 56 ALEMAN GONZALEZ V. BARR E. The Outcome of the Clearly Irreconcilable