ATLANTA (AP) — An Atlanta-based appeals court has rejected a no-bond policy implemented by the Trump administration for people in immigration proceedings, further deepening a divide among federal appeals courts about whether people can be kept in detention while their cases are pending.
A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the 2-1 ruling Wednesday. The 2nd Circuit had already reached a similar conclusion in April, while the 8th and 5th circuit courts previously upheld the policy that has been in effect since July. Meanwhile, a 7th Circuit panel on Tuesday split three ways on the policy, with one judge rejecting the Trump administration policy, another agreeing with it and the third declining to weigh in on the matter.
With the circuit split deepening, the U.S. Supreme Court could be called upon to resolve the issue.
The appeal decided by the 11th Circuit stemmed from lower court rulings in the cases of two Mexican men who had been living in the United States without authorization since 2019 and 2015 and were arrested during traffic stops in Florida in September and placed in deportation proceedings.
The Department of Homeland Security policy has been denying bond hearings to people in immigration detention, including those who have been in the country for years without any criminal history. Previously, most noncitizens without a criminal record who were not arrested at the border were allowed to seek a bond hearing while their immigration cases were pending.
Bond was often granted if the person was not deemed a flight risk. Mandatory detention was generally reserved for people who had just entered the U.S.
The 11th Circuit ruling was written by Senior Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, an appointee of former Democratic President Bill Clinton, and joined by Circuit Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, also a Democrat. Trump-appointed Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa dissented.
The ruling says the majority was “unpersuaded by the Government's re-interpretation” of a section of federal law that it says limits detention without bond people who are “seeking admission” into the country.
“Simply put, the language that Congress has chosen to use does not grant to the Executive unfettered authority to detain, without the possibility of bond, every unadmitted alien present in the country,” the ruling says. Reading the words in the statute, “it appears to us that Congress has instead preserved the longstanding border-interior distinction for the purposes of detention, a posiition it has taken for over a hundred years.”
Lagoa disagreed with the majority opinion, finding, “There is no dispute that unlawfully present aliens are applicants for admission pursuant to the deeming provision.”
“The majority’s argument amounts to the claim that the provision fits arriving aliens better. Maybe so,” she wrote, but added that “a more comfortable fit does not allow us to read an exception” into the law.
Trump administration lawyers have argued that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 supports the mandatory detention policy. That law simplified the process for deporting new arrivals who lacked authorization to be in the country, but a different law allowed people already in the country to ask an immigration judge for bond.
But Todd Lyons, acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in July that all people in deportation proceedings would be treated the same as new arrivals.
Unable to ask an immigration judge for bond, detainees are using habeas corpus petitions in federal court to challenge their detention. That is creating a crushing workload for the federal courts, with more than 30,000 lawsuits filed by people detained without bond as the Trump administration pursues mass deportations.
FILE - The Department of Homeland Security logo during a news conference in Washington, Feb. 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
MADRID (AP) — Health authorities across four continents Thursday were tracking down and monitoring passengers who disembarked a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship before its deadly outbreak was detected, and trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
In Argentina, a team of investigators tasked with determining the origins of the deadly hantavirus on a cruise ship has yet to leave for the southern town they suspect is the source, officials from the country's Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Thursday.
On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger had died on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing, the ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday.
Three passengers have died in the outbreak — a Dutch couple and a German national — and several others are sick. Symptoms usually show between one and eight weeks after exposure.
None of the remaining passengers or crew on the ship are currently symptomatic, the Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship company said Thursday.
The World Health Organization says the risk to the wider public is low. Hantavirus is usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and isn't easily transmitted between people.
“We believe this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity is shown across all countries,” said Dr. Abdirahman Mahamud, the WHO's alert and response director on Thursday.
Three people, including the ship’s doctor, were evacuated Wednesday while the ship was near the West African island country of Cape Verde and taken to specialized hospitals in Europe for treatment.
The body of the Dutch man who was the first to die on board on April 11 was taken off the ship on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena on April 24, when his wife also disembarked. She then flew to South Africa a day later and died there.
The ship's operator said Thursday that a total of 30 passengers — including the deceased Dutch man and his wife — left the vessel at St. Helena. The Dutch Foreign Ministry has put the figure at about 40. The company had not previously said publicly that dozens more people left the ship on April 24.
It wasn't until May 2 that health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a passenger on the ship, the WHO says. That was in a British man evacuated from the ship to South Africa three days after the St. Helena stop. He was tested in South Africa and is in intensive care there.
It emerged Wednesday that a man tested positive for hantavirus in Switzerland after he disembarked at St. Helena, though his precise movements in between aren’t clear.
On Thursday, Singaporean health authorities said they were monitoring two men who got off the ship at St. Helena, flew to South Africa and then home. The two men, who arrived in Singapore at different times, were being isolated and tested, officials said.
Authorities in St. Helena, the volcanic British territory in the South Atlantic where passengers disembarked, said they were monitoring a small number of people who were considered “higher risk contacts.” Those higher risk contacts were being told to isolate for 45 days, the St. Helena government said.
The Dutch health ministry said Thursday that a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger in South Africa was showing symptoms of hantavirus and would be tested in an isolation ward at a hospital in Amsterdam. The cruise passenger, also a Dutch woman, was too ill to fly and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died.
If the woman tests positive, she could be the first known person not on the MV Hondius to become infected in the outbreak.
The vessel is now sailing to Spain’s Canary Islands, where it is expected to arrive on Saturday or Sunday, with more than 140 passengers and crew members still on board.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday that he had been in regular touch with the ship's captain, and that morale improved once it began moving again.
Authorities in South Africa are also trying to trace contacts of any passengers who previously got off the ship. They have focused mainly on an April 25 flight from St. Helena to Johannesburg, the day after passengers disembarked there.
A French citizen with “benign symptoms” is in isolation and undergoing medical tests, after being identified as a contact case linked to the ship passenger who flew April 25 from St. Helena to Johannesburg and was confirmed to have hantavirus, the French Health Ministry said in a statement Thursday.
The Dutch woman from the cruise ship who later died in South Africa briefly boarded that flight, officials have said. It's not known how many other cruise passengers also were among the 88 people on it, but flights from St. Helena go to South Africa and are rare, normally once a week.
The body of the third fatality, a German woman, is also still on board the ship after she died on May 2.
Tests have confirmed that at least five people who were on the ship were infected with a hantavirus found in South America, called the Andes virus. The only hantavirus thought to spread human-to-human, it can cause a severe and often fatal lung disease called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.
The ship departed from Argentina and investigations into the outbreak’s source are focusing there.
The Dutch couple that presented the first two cases had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip before boarding the ship, the WHO said. They visited sites where the species of rat known to carry Andes virus was present.
The WHO is working with health authorities in Argentina to understand the couple's movements and has arranged to ship 2,500 diagnostic kits from Argentina to laboratories in five countries.
Argentina’s health ministry said there were 28 deaths from hantavirus last year, up from an average mortality rate of 15 in the five years before that. Nearly a third of cases last year were fatal, it said.
Argentina’s Health Ministry has zeroed in on the town of Ushuaia in their investigation, but they’ve yet to dispatch the team, according to a written statement given to AP. Officials were unable to provide details about the investigation, telling AP only that scientists from the state-funded Malbrán Institute planned to travel to Ushuaia “in the coming days.”
When asked about the delay, the ministry said only that authorities were still making preparations. Ushuaia is a 3.5-hour flight from Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires.
Quell reported from The Hague, Netherlands. Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa. AP writers Jill Lawless in London and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed.
A view of the m/v Hondius Cruise ship anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Monday, May 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Arilson Almeida)
Health workers get off the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius, a cruise ship carrying nearly 150 people as it remains off Cape Verde on Monday, May 4, 2026 after three passengers died and several others fell seriously ill in a suspected hantavirus outbreak. (Qasem Elhato via AP)
Medical personnel in hazmat suits wait for patients, evacuated from the MV Hondius cruise ship with suspected hantavirus infection, at Schiphol airport, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
The MV Hondius cruise ship departs the port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
