They're doing this deliberately.

Somehow, I don't feel threatened by these people being out on bail....

You know what the law's been interpreted to say, you decide to revise that interpretation, and when the courts strike it down you shrug as if to say, "Worth a shot."

That's been used in a number of instances this century.

Don't see "bond hearing" explicit anywhere in there. But I skimmed and maybe I overlooked it or it was found between a ";" and an overt word.

But the repeated references in 8 USC 1229a about an immigrant's inability to be there so videoconferencing hearing proceedings, being tried in absentia, etc., etc., rather seems to imply that there's a reasonable expectation under *that* bit of the statute that there's some say to spring them from detention.

Otherwise, the claims that the argument being made is completely out of the blue and unheard of just means the lawyer self-siloed or was young or wasn't paying attention years ago. This interpretation of the law has been boilerplate in even well-known and fairly mainstreamed RW publications going back at least to Obama's first term, I just haven't seen in the more centrist or left-leaning publications, even to point at it and laugh. By "centrist" I mean those typically rated as fairly center, NYT and WaPo.

The claim got a rather public airing and counterargument at the time: The executive branch simply did not have the funds to detain all the immigrants that the law (seemed? to have) called for, the counter went, so it was utterly necessary, inevitable even, "prosecutorial discretion" not to detain them. This wasn't a principled legal argument, but an argument based on resource allocation, sometimes ending with a moderately snarky line to the effect that if you want that bit enforced, properly fund the executive branch to be able to do that. Like DAs who don't prosecute very low level crimes because all their staff are busy prosecuting important crimes, not of minor disturbances to property but violence, large thefts, that kind of thing.

(and they have many of these types of "policy guidelines" for staff), it's possible that ICE had similar operations manuals for how to handle certain situations. It wouldn't explicitly be considered "the statute" but it would set out processes and procedures for what the staff would or could do within the framework of the statute.

I know my agency had "Guidance Manuals" for each of the programmatic offices and those were maintained and updated under strict "change control" procedures when revisions occurred.