Full Fifth Circuit Upholds Trump’s No-Bond Detention Policy for Illegal Immigrants
The full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the Trump administration can hold certain illegal immigrants without bond hearings while their deportation cases move forward, the Washington Examiner reported.
The 10-7 en banc decision is the most consequential appellate win yet for the administration’s mandatory detention policy for people who entered the country without permission, according to Politico.
Judge Cory Wilson, a Trump appointee, wrote the 159-page majority opinion in Sosnava Rodriguez v. Ortega, joined by eight colleagues. Judge Priscilla Richman agreed with the result but not the majority’s reasoning.
The case involved three men without criminal records who lived in Texas before ICE arrested them in late 2025 and early 2026, according to The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate.
“We now conclude that Petitioners were not entitled to individual hearings on their dangerousness or flight risk before they could be lawfully detained by immigration authorities pending their removal proceedings,” Wilson wrote.
“Moreover, the duration of Petitioners’ detention presented no constitutional issues warranting habeas relief,” he added, noting that noncitizens can be released “at any moment by agreeing to leave the country,” Bloomberg Law reported.
Wilson said the Constitution gives Congress, “not courts,” broad authority over immigration. “Neither we nor the district courts are free to ignore that bedrock principle and rewrite the immigration policy Congress has enacted,” he wrote.
Judge James Ho went further in a concurrence, calling the habeas petitions “profoundly un-American — because they send the message that the only people who are above the law in our country are the ones who violated our laws to get in.”
Dissenters Warn of an ‘Impenetrable Wall’
Seven judges dissented. Judge Leslie Southwick said the majority built “an impenetrable wall between the Constitution and these long-term residents,” while Judge Dana Douglas accused the majority of relying on “sham history.”
Judge Andrew Oldham, another Trump appointee, fired back at that charge, writing that “what Congress says goes, and the Constitution does nothing to change what counts as a ball or a strike.”
DHS counsel James Percival cheered the ruling. “Big win in the Fifth Circuit on mandatory detention for illegal aliens, a principle codified in 1996 legislation but ignored by the deep state for decades,” he said.
Rebecca Cassler of the American Immigration Council, who argued for the men, said the ruling “allows the government to lock people up when detention plainly serves no purpose, and without any way to challenge it.”
The policy, adopted last year, treats long-term illegal residents as people “seeking admission,” the category once reserved for new border crossers. The New Orleans paper said roughly 18,000 habeas petitions followed.
The 5th Circuit stands nearly alone. At least nine other appeals courts have ruled against the administration’s reading of the law, while the 8th Circuit has upheld it, the Examiner reported.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments Nov. 4 in Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha on whether federal law requires such detention. Friday’s ruling answered a separate question: whether the Constitution demands bond hearings anyway.
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