A federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled on Wednesday that some immigrants could not be held in detention longer than six months without a bail hearing while waiting for deportation cases to be heard.

The ruling applies to immigrants convicted of certain crimes that are considered removable offenses. Previously there had been no limit on how long they could be detained while awaiting an immigration hearing.

The decision could affect hundreds of immigrants in the New York City area alone.

The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit followed a similar ruling this week in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California, thereby aligning detention law

in the nation’s largest immigrant hubs.

“We join the Ninth Circuit in holding that mandatory detention for longer than six months without a bond hearing affronts due process,” wrote Judge Barrington D. Parker in the decision by the Second Circuit’s three-judge panel.

The decision puts the burden on the government to determine whether a non-citizen is a flight risk or a danger to the community.

Alisa Wellek, the executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project, a legal advocacy group in New York, said that the two federal appeals courts had “sent a clear message” to the government not to let immigrants stay in

detention indefinitely while they pursue legitimate cases against deportation.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, one of the defendants in the case, declined to comment on the ruling or whether the government would appeal to the Supreme Court.

The case capped nearly two years of petitions and appeals, an effort led by the New York Immigration Family Unity Project, which offers free representation to immigrants in detention.

In November 2013, Alexander Lora, a lawful permanent resident who came to Brooklyn from the Dominican Republic when he was nearly 7 years old, was three years into his five-year sentence for a 2010 conviction for

offenses relating to cocaine possession.

He was never sentenced to jail time, and had not violated his probation when agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him early one morning in Brooklyn.

Within weeks of his detention in Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, N.J., Mr. Lora, 33, had lost his construction job and his infant son was sent to a foster family, he said.

Mr. Lora, with lawyers from Brooklyn Defender Services, petitioned for a bail hearing and was released after five and a half months on $5,000 bond. The Second Circuit decision noted he would have been held longer than

six months without winning that earlier decision.

The Second Circuit found that the government did have a right to detain him.

Mr. Lora’s immigration case is not scheduled until 2018. In the meantime, he has regained custody of his son and has found another construction job.

“I’m very happy because I hope nobody goes through what I went through,” Mr. Lora said on Friday. “Every time you make a move, they put you in handcuffs. You can’t just pick up a phone and call. I lost my family.”

Alina Das, a co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law, who supervised Mr. Lora’s appeal, said that despite the criminal court having long ago resolved his case, Mr. Lora’s detention

was like double jeopardy. “Immigrants every day are experiencing this second punishment in the form of being detained and being told they can’t seek a bond hearing,” she said.

Now, she said, for those facing prolonged detention, at least this ruling “puts a limit on it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/ny...=nyregion&_r=0