Appeals Court: Illegal Aliens Have No Right To Roam Free
One of President Donald Trump’s signature 2024 campaign pledges was to reverse Joe Biden’s open-borders policies and begin mass deportations of the tens of millions of illegal aliens he let into the country.
By any measure, Trump has kept his pledge, though it’s not been easy: Far-left Democrats and their allies have fought him tooth and nail every step of the way, filing one legal action after another in hand-picked federal courts.
Slowly but surely, however, the Trump administration has managed to win key courtroom victories that have allowed the president to fully implement his mass deportation agenda.
And the administration won another big victory this week.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled late Tuesday that individuals who are in the United States unlawfully do not have a constitutional right to remain free from detention while their removal proceedings are pending.
In an opinion authored by Chief Judge Jennifer Elrod, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, the appeals court overturned a lower court’s order that had granted bond hearings to three immigrants held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and ordered their release.
The Fifth Circuit stayed the lower court’s orders while the appeal moves forward.
Following the decision, Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division said the ruling confirms that “illegal aliens do not have a constitutional right to roam free in the United States during their removal proceedings.”
The dispute stems from a February ruling in which a lower court granted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed by Ignacio Sosnava Rodriguez, a man in the United States unlawfully who was arrested during a 2025 traffic stop.
Rodriguez, who had lived in Texas for 22 years, argued while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody that his detention without a bond hearing violated his Fifth Amendment right to due process.
The lower court agreed, applying the three-factor balancing test established by the Supreme Court in Mathews v. Eldridge.
The Fifth Circuit, however, rejected that conclusion and denied Rodriguez’s petition without the case being heard by the court’s full complement of judges.
Shumate said Tuesday’s ruling establishes an “extraordinary precedential order” that will guide similar cases in the future.
The Fifth Circuit also stayed lower court orders granting relief to two other individuals in ICE custody, Alejandro Villegas Angel and Miguel Angel Gomez.
Meanwhile, also Tuesday, federal appeals court overturned a 2025 ruling that had ordered the Trump administration to release pro-Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi from immigration detention.
Mahdawi was among several non-citizen students placed in removal proceedings last year after participating in protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
The cases sparked legal challenges over the intersection of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies and First Amendment free speech protections.
Mahdawi was released after spending two weeks in detention following a ruling by Chief U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford in Vermont, an Obama appointee, who concluded that he was entitled to the same First Amendment free speech protections as U.S. citizens.
“In overturning that ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Crawford did not have jurisdiction over the case because it should have been resolved in immigration court first,” Reuters reported this week.
Earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance and the Department of Labor’s inspector general announced a new investigation into alleged abuse of U.S. work visas by foreign nationals, describing it as part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to combat fraud.
Speaking at an anti-fraud event in Milwaukee, Vance said Labor Department officials had issued dozens of subpoenas as part of the investigation, which he said is intended to ensure that “American jobs … go to American workers and not foreign fraudsters.”
