Fifth Circuit Sides With Trump on Immigrant Detention Law (1)

The Trump administration has the power to detain noncitizens arrested in the interior of the country without giving them a chance to argue for their release in immigration court, a Fifth Circuit panel ruled Friday.

The split decision came just days after oral arguments and represents a major victory for the administration, which has used its novel interpretation of detention statutes to further its goal of mass deportations.

Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee writing for the majority, said even though that interpretation of the law is contrary to decades of practice, “the government’s past practice has little to do with the statute’s text.”

“The text says what it says, regardless of the decisions of prior Administrations,” she wrote in a decision joined by Trump appointee Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan. “Years of consistent practice cannot vindicate an interpretation that is inconsistent with a statute’s plain text.”

Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee, wrote a lengthy and strongly worded dissent.

“The majority seems to be unable to imagine what it might mean to be detained within the United States without the appropriate proof of admissibility, and, without a bond hearing, to require the services of a federal habeas corpus lawyer to show that one is entitled to release and deserves to see the outside of a detention center again,” she wrote.

“This is not, or not just, a matter of human sympathy, but rather a matter of understanding one of the core distinctions in immigration law, and the very good reasons for it.”

Friday’s opinion reverses the orders of two Texas district court judges, who said two men who crossed illegally many years ago should have bond hearings.

The administration’s mandatory detention policy has led to an unrelenting flood of habeas petitions in which the overwhelming majority of lower court judges have sided against the Trump administration’s reading of the law.

The matter is just now reaching appellate courts. The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the administration’s logic in an interim decision last year and heard further arguments this week.

The Fifth Circuit majority on Friday sided with the government’s contention that noncitizens in the interior of the country are “seeking admission” to the country and thus not by statute entitled to bond hearings.

Just because they may have been here for years doesn’t mean that, under the law, they aren’t “seeking admission” to the US, Jones wrote, citing an example of a student applying to college.

“It would make no sense to say that as soon as the applicant clicks ‘submit’ on her application, she is no longer seeking admission, merely because she does not take any further affirmative steps to gain admittance,” Jones wrote.

And just because administrations before Trump didn’t exercise their full authority to detain immigrants “does not mean they lacked the authority to do more,” Jones wrote.

‘Not the Law Congress Passed’

In a fiery dissent, Douglas said the lawmakers who wrote the statute “would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people.

“For almost thirty years there was no sign anyone thought it had done so, and nothing in the congressional record or the history of the statute’s enforcement suggests that it did,” she said.

Douglas, who also noted the government sought a speedier decision in the Fifth Circuit but not in the less conservative Seventh, said the unprecedented interpretation is “based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained—some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.”

“The government’s proposed reading of the statute would mean that, for purposes of immigration detention, the border is now everywhere,” she wrote. “That is not the law Congress passed, and if it had, it would have spoken much more clearly.”

The case is Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, 5th Cir., Nos. 25-20496, 25-40701 (cons.), opinion 2/6/26