Immigrants detained inside the United States while fighting deportation have no constitutional right to a bond hearing, a divided federal appeals court ruled Friday, handing the Trump administration a major win in its effort to keep interior arrests in custody through the entirety of their immigration cases.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in New Orleans, ruled 10-7 to reverse a smaller panel of the same court, siding with the government and shutting down the primary legal avenue that federal judges in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi had been using to order the release of migrants who challenged prolonged detention.
The decision affirms a policy the administration put in place last year allowing immigration authorities to hold people arrested in the interior of the country until their deportation proceedings conclude, with no opportunity to ask a judge for release on bond in the meantime. That marks a departure from the practice under prior administrations, in which migrants deemed neither a flight risk nor a danger could typically post bond and remain free while their cases moved through the system.
Judge Cory Wilson, a Trump appointee who wrote for the majority, said the three men who brought the challenge were still legally considered applicants for admission to the country and therefore were not entitled to a due-process hearing. He wrote that each of them could end his own detention “at any moment by agreeing to leave the country.”
The men at the center of the case are from Mexico and Honduras. All three have children who are U.S. citizens, and they were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement following traffic stops. One of the men had lived in the United States for more than 22 years before his arrest.
Concurrence and Dissent
In a concurring opinion, Judge James Ho framed the ruling as a defense of basic sovereignty. “A nation ceases to be a nation if it can’t protect its borders,” he wrote, arguing that the dissenting judges’ approach would create an incentive for people to settle in the country unlawfully.
The dissenting judges countered that the majority’s reasoning strips long-term residents of constitutional protections the Supreme Court has recognized for decades.
“A nation ceases to be a nation if it can’t protect its borders.” — Judge James Ho, concurring opinion
James Percival, the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the outcome on social media, calling it a “big win.”
Supreme Court Still to Weigh In
The ruling lands just weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a related case concerning the same detention policy. That case, however, is narrower in scope: the justices will decide only whether federal immigration statutes require bond hearings, not whether the Constitution itself demands them — the exact question the Fifth Circuit resolved on Friday.
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