A federal appeals court on Oct. 21 sided with an Iranian man who argued that his redetainment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was unlawful.
The Colorado-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, issued a 2–1 ruling against the Trump administration’s arguments that a six-month detention period, as outlined by the Supreme Court, resets with each rearrest of an immigrant in removal proceedings.
Judge Carolyn McHugh, writing for the majority, said the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 in Zadvydas v. Davis that the federal government cannot indefinitely detain removable noncitizens when deportation is not foreseeable in the near future.
“The government effectively asks us to treat Zadvydas as establishing a resettable six-month grace period that applies to any period of immigration detention, permitting the government to detain a noncitizen for any number of repeated six-month stints so long as these periods of detention are separated by some moment of freedom,” McHugh said.
The case involves Kaveh Abedi, who fled Iran in 1991 with his family when he was 10 years old. The family members were all granted asylum in the United States.
When Abedi was 21 years old, he was convicted in California on a drug possession charge.
An immigration judge signed off on his deportation order but granted Abedi’s request for deferral of his removal under the Convention Against Torture, a U.N. treaty, and he was released under supervision orders.
For the next 20 years, McHugh wrote, Abedi complied with his conditions of release.
The Iranian man married a U.S. citizen in 2016, and the pair relocated from California to Kansas in June 2025, with permission from ICE officials.
Later that month, Abedi was arrested in his front yard by ICE agents, who told him that his release conditions had been revoked. According to the court ruling, the arresting agents initially said they intended to deport him to Iran.
Later, in a written Notice of Revocation issued to Abedi while he was detained, the federal government said his removal to “a country other than Iran is now a possibility.”
Under federal law, ICE must provide a redetained individual with an “informal interview.”
At that time, he can respond to the reasons for the revocation of the release order and argue whether there is still no likelihood of deportation in the near future.
“Mr. Abedi asserts, and the government does not dispute, that … he had never received the promised informal interview,” McHugh said in the majority opinion.
After his redetainment, Abedi challenged its legality under the 2001 Supreme Court ruling and accused ICE of violating its own guidelines by not providing him with an interview, claiming that this violated his due process rights.
A lower district court initially denied Abedi’s request for relief and judgment on the legality of his detention and rejected his motion for a preliminary injunction to block the federal government from transferring him out of his current jurisdiction in Kansas.
But that same lower court invited Abedi to file a new petition for relief under the Zadvydas v. Davis ruling if his detention lasted longer than six months.
By January 2026, Abedi had been held for more than six months, and he filed a new petition, arguing that there was no real likelihood of his imminent deportation, so he was entitled to relief from his detention under the Supreme Court ruling.
The district court granted that petition, and Abedi was released.
After the lower court had initially rejected Abedi’s requests, he appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.
Since the Iranian man was eventually released, the federal government filed a motion to dismiss the appeal as moot.
The judges disagreed, pointing to other cases in which individuals had been redetained after they were released.
“Applying the reasoning of these cases to the facts of [Abedi’s] case, we conclude that Mr. Abedi has established a reasonable expectation that his [redetainment] will recur,” McHugh wrote.
Judge Allison Eid, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, dissented, writing that the appeal should be dismissed because his release from immigration detention mooted the case.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment about the ruling.
