Full Fifth Circuit Rules Illegal Aliens Can Be Detained During Deportation Proceedings WITHOUT Bond Hearings, Even After Decades in the US
President Donald Trump has scored another major legal victory in his administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration!
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit delivered a significant victory for the Trump administration on Friday, ruling that illegal aliens who entered the United States without authorization do not have a constitutional right to individualized bond hearings while their deportation proceedings are underway, even if they have lived in the country for decades.
The 10-7 en banc decision reversed three lower-court orders that had granted release to the detainees and vacated a July panel ruling that had imposed a 90-day limit before bond hearings on due process grounds.
The decision represents a major setback for immigration activists seeking to force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to provide individualized bond hearings before continuing to detain certain illegal immigrants.
Trump-appointed Judge Cory Wilson, writing for the majority, made clear that aliens who have never been lawfully admitted have no constitutional entitlement to extra proceedings beyond what Congress wrote into the Immigration and Nationality Act.
“To the extent petitioners seek to vindicate a liberty interest to be free from physical restraint in the most abstract sense, they can do so at any moment by agreeing to leave the country,” Wilson wrote.
The court held that “Because petitioners have never been admitted to the United States, due process does not entitle them to additional proceedings beyond what Congress has provided before they may be detained pending removal.”
The consolidated cases, Sosnava Rodriguez v. Ortega and companions, involve three men who entered illegally years ago and lived in Texas: Ignacio Sosnava Rodriguez (entered around 2004), Alejandro Villegas Angel (entered 2011), and Miguel Angel Gomez Alvarado (Honduran, entered 2012).
All had lived in the U.S. for 14 or more years, worked, had no criminal records, and are fathers of U.S. citizen children.
Texas state troopers arrested them during traffic stops between late 2025 and early 2026 and handed them to ICE, which detained them under the administration’s mandatory detention policy without offering bond hearings. District courts ordered their release; the full Fifth Circuit has now reversed those orders.
Not everyone on the court agreed.
Seven judges dissented from the majority’s decision, with Biden-appointed Judge Dana Douglas delivering a sharply worded warning about the consequences of the ruling.
Douglas argued that allowing federal authorities to detain immigrants without individualized judicial review could undermine fundamental constitutional protections.
She wrote:
“Unchecked, executive authority to arrest and detain, indefinitely, echoes fearfully from history.”
For years, open-borders activists and activist judges have treated illegal entry as a temporary inconvenience rather than a continuing violation. The Fifth Circuit has repeatedly rejected that view. Aliens who crossed without inspection do not acquire the same release rights as those who followed the law simply by remaining undetected. They can end their detention at any time by accepting removal. President Trump’s ICE is enforcing the statute Congress wrote; Friday’s ruling confirms the Constitution does not rewrite it.
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