The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled 10-7 on Friday, October 23, that immigrants who entered the United States without being admitted have no constitutional right to a bond hearing while their deportation cases are pending, according to Courthouse News Service and The Texas Tribune reporting cited in multiple accounts of the decision.

Source: The Digital Free Press / Courthouse News Service

Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote the majority opinion in Sosnava Rodriguez v. Vergara. The en banc ruling reverses three district court orders that had freed three long-term Texas residents and barred their re-detention without a hearing, and it vacates a July three-judge panel decision that would have required bond hearings within 90 days.

The three men at the centre of the case — Ignacio Sosnava Rodriguez, Miguel Angel Gomez Alvarado and Alejandro Villegas Angel — had each lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years, according to reporting on the case. Texas state troopers arrested them after traffic stops and turned them over to ICE, which held them with no hearing before federal judges ordered their release.

The ruling is binding precedent in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, the three states in the Fifth Circuit. It does not order the detention of every person arrested by ICE; it applies to people covered by the mandatory-detention provision, 8 U.S.C. 1225(b)(2)(A), who were never lawfully admitted.

Seven judges dissented. Judge Leslie Southwick, Judge Stephen Higginson and Judge Dana Douglas each wrote dissents raising due-process concerns about prolonged detention without an individual hearing on danger or flight risk.

For Punjabi and other immigrant families in Texas — home to large diaspora communities in Houston and Dallas — the decision means a person in this category can remain detained for the full length of a removal case in the Fifth Circuit, unless they agree to leave the country or win their case. Challenges in other circuits continue, and a related dispute is before the U.S. Supreme Court, so the national picture is not settled.

Source: Times Now World