The class action that just reshaped immigration detention across nine western states is named for a man from Grandview, in the Yakima Valley. Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez has lived in the United States since 2009. He owns his home. He has no criminal history. In 2025, ICE officers arrested him at that home, and the Tacoma Immigration Court denied him any bond hearing, on the government's theory that a 1996 statute makes detention mandatory for anyone arrested in the interior, however long they have lived here and whatever their record. [1]
On Wednesday the Ninth Circuit held, 2 to 1, that the theory misreads the law. People arrested in the interior are detained under 8 U.S.C. 1226(a), the discretionary provision that comes with a bond hearing, rather than 1225(b)(2), the mandatory provision written for arrivals at the border. The majority was Judge Daniel Bress, a Trump appointee, and Judge M. Margaret McKeown, a Clinton appointee; Judge Carlos Bea dissented. [2] The ruling affirms Judge Tiffany Cartwright's decisions below, a preliminary injunction in April 2025, class certification that May, and a partial summary judgment last September declaring the Bond Denial Class detained under the discretionary provision. [3]
What changes is concrete. Across the Ninth Circuit's nine states, plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, thousands of detainees arrested in the interior can now ask an immigration judge for bond. [1] Asking is all it guarantees; judges can and do deny. What it replaces is the regime Matt Adams of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project described: "Before this, the only way for people like our class members to get a bond hearing was to file a habeas petition in federal court, but the majority of detained people do not have an attorney." [1]
The government's position deserves its own words. DHS said the administration is "now enforcing the law as it was actually written to keep America safe," and spokesperson Jason Chudy said the department "strongly disagrees" and expects Supreme Court review next year. [1][2] The disagreement is real and nationally unresolved: the Fifth and Eighth Circuits have sided with the government's reading, while the Second, Sixth, Tenth, Eleventh and now Ninth have rejected it, a 5-2 split, and the administration asked the Supreme Court to take the question up last month. [2]
One detail we could not verify and will not assert: which judge wrote the majority opinion. The panel's composition is confirmed; the opinion PDF would not yield to our text extraction, and no fetched account names the author. The record above is what the reporting and the docket establish.
Until the Supreme Court answers, the law of the American West is what the Ninth Circuit said it is on Wednesday: a man arrested at his own front door, after seventeen years in his community, gets to stand before a judge and ask to go home while his case is heard. Whether that survives the next term is now the question, and it is on the docket at the government's own request.
