Justice in practice: Insights on the application of immigration detention from my judicial internship

By Cindy Kuang ’25

My internship in the chambers of Judge Myong J. Joun in the United States District Court of Massachusetts through the Judicial Process in Trial Courts Clinic was an enriching and transformative experience that provided me with invaluable insights into the complexities of the judicial system. After spending so much time reading judges’ opinions in the classroom, I was eager to observe the administration of justice in practice.

The most impactful experience of the internship was working on a case in which Judge Joun granted the habeas corpus petition of an asylum applicant who had been held for 11 months in a state Correctional Facility. As I conducted research and briefed the judge on this case, my exposure to the complicated realities of immigration detention taught me the difficulties of judicial decision-making in the face of human costs.

Immersing in Immigration Law

Working on this habeas petition required me to delve deeply into immigration law, specifically concerning the detention of non-citizens. The petitioner was a Mexican national who had been detained for immediate removal before claiming asylum for fear of political persecution. As his asylum application wound its way through the complicated procedural routes of the immigration court system, the petitioner could not be removed from the country—but neither was he permitted to leave the detention facility. In evaluating his petition for release, the court needed to determine whether such prolonged detention verged on violating the detainee’s constitutional rights.

Such a question proved much more difficult to answer than we thought. Immigration detention is exceptionally unsettled legal terrain. The provision governing the petitioner’s detention—8 U.S.C. § 1236(a)(6)—has been subject to numerous judicial interpretations, particularly since the Supreme Court’s decision in Zadvydas v. Davis (2001). This landmark case limited the permissible duration of detention for immigrants awaiting removal, so that detention beyond a presumptive 6-month period required a showing that removal is “reasonably foreseeable.”

Since Zadvydas, the Supreme Court has provided little incremental guidance on how to determine if a particular detainee’s removal is “reasonably foreseeable.” In the past two decades, lower courts have struggled to apply this nebulous standard. While the Supreme Court has as recently as 2022 opined that Zadvydas does not require detainees to receive mandatory bail hearings once their detention has exceeded six months, the trial courts—which hear the vast majority of such cases—have received no further clarity on when the Constitution affirmatively requires the court to end an immigrant’s detention (or order a bail hearing).

Challenges of Judicial Application

In this case, I saw how a lack of judicial clarity can have serious human costs. Before we could even consider the petition, we needed to sift through voluminous case law across jurisdictions to better understand how to apply the Zadvydas standard. The work was extremely time-consuming and often required us to retrace our steps in an attempt to reconcile the wildly varied approaches to adjudicating Zadvydas cases taken by different trial courts. The time spent researching these legal questions directly impacted the petitioner, who remained in detention under prison-like conditions for each additional day that we spent evaluating his case. Without a clear rule, our work was also heavily fact-intensive. As a result, when the petitioner’s asylum application was unexpectedly remanded to an immigration judge for additional fact-finding, this change in circumstance—though enormously fortunate for the petitioner—further extended our deliberations as we searched for new precedent with which to analogize these changing facts. Ultimately, our commitment to the proper administration of justice required us to proceed carefully, but additional clarity in the law we were called on to apply would undeniably have allowed this petitioner an earlier chance at release.

My work on this case—and during the rest of my internship — revealed the critical role trial courts play in interpreting and applying the law, often under challenging and unclear circumstances. Above all, my experience demonstrated to me the profound real-world impact that the law can have. When we approach the law in an academic manner, it is easy to forget that the names we read in court opinions are attached to human lives. As I embark on my legal career, I am inspired to foreground this awareness in my practice. My internship experience has reinforced my dedication to upholding the principles of due process and fairness to the litigant, and I am deeply motivated to ensure that the law serves to protect individual liberties effectively and compassionately.