Has anyone in America ever loved anything as much as today's wingnuts love locking immigrants up in detention camps? And we ask this knowing full well that Americans love lots of terrible things. Guns. Racism. TV shows created by Dick Wolf.

The latest step on the nation's road to ignoring whatever lessons were available to us after the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II came about on Friday night. That was when a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals released a ruling stating that everyone had been interpreting a particular aspect of federal immigration law incorrectly since 1996. And when we say everyone, we mean five presidents (including Donald Trump in his first term), immigration attorneys, the entire immigration apparatus of the federal government, and the vast, vast number of federal judges who have looked at the issue over the last year. Including Trump appointees!

But this new interpretation gives the Trump administration something it desperately wants: the legal seal of approval to lock up every immigrant its stormtroopers can get their hands on, no matter their age, health, legal status, or length of time they have been in this country. God, the sex Stephen and Katie Miller probably had after hearing this news must have been mind-blowing.

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The clearest explanation we have found for this came from Chris Geidner at his excellent Law Dork newsletter. The issue can be found in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). Under this law, people who are present in America without ever having been legally admitted "are subject to a section of law that allows release and requires bond hearings (absent exceptions in the law) if the government seeks to deport them." Easy enough to understand.

Now, under a different section of the IIRIRA, anyone classified as an "arriving alien" -- say, someone who shows up at the Mexican border and asks for asylum -- gets "mandatory detention." But the Trump team has come up with a novel interpretation: This second section of the law should also apply to people in that first group. All of a sudden, literally millions of people who have gone decades building their lives while their deportation cases work their way through the system are being told they should have been locked up instead. And as we have seen from actions in Minneapolis and a bunch of other places, immigration authorities under Trump are doing their darndest to make that happen.

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