A federal appellate court has reversed a ruling requiring bond hearings for illegal aliens detained during removal proceedings, finding that aliens seeking admission are not granted the same due process rights as those already granted admission.
The court noted that deportation proceedings would be in vain if aliens could not be detained in the interim.
Background
Three aliens, Ignacio Sosnava Rodriguez, Alejandro Villegas Angel, and Miguel Angel Gomez Alvarado, illegally entered the country more than a decade ago and were subsequently detained.
All three aliens filed an application for a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, which, if granted, would bring them before a court to challenge their detention. They argued that their detention without a bond hearing violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The Due Process Clause provides, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The aliens asserted that this language applies even to them.
However, a federal statute requires that illegal aliens must be detained during removal proceedings if they are “seeking admission” into the U.S. and are “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.” This is the statute under which the three aliens were being held.
Yet in each of the aliens’ cases, the district court determined that the alien could raise a Fifth Amendment challenge to his mandatory detention without bond, ordering the immediate release of each alien. This prohibited the government from detaining them again without a hearing to determine each alien’s “individual dangerousness or risk of flight.”
The government appealed each order to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which granted review and consolidated the three cases for expedited consideration before a three-judge panel.
As previously reported, the panel affirmed the lower court orders in a 2-1 ruling, reasoning that illegal aliens are entitled to a bond hearing within 90 days of detention under the “all persons” language of the Due Process Clause.
Judge Leslie Southwick wrote the decision, joined by Judge James Graves Jr. Judge Cory Wilson dissented, noting that the duration of the aliens’ detention did not justify relief.
Rehearing
On its own accord, the Fifth Circuit ordered a rehearing of the case en banc, meaning before all 17 active judges.
On October 23, the en banc court decided in a 10-7 split to reverse the panel’s decision, rejecting the aliens’ requested relief. This time, Judge Wilson wrote the opinion.
Wilson reiterated his point that the facts of this particular case do not warrant relief, since two of the three aliens were not detained for more than 90 days. He also noted that it is “surpassing strange” for the aliens to “vindicate a liberty interest to be free from physical restraint,” when they “can do so at any moment by agreeing to leave the country.”
More significantly, he explained how Southwick and Graves Jr. were wrong to ignore federal law permitting the detention of aliens seeking admission to the U.S., who are not guaranteed to be granted admission.
Wilson reasoned that the Supreme Court has already “emphasized that admission status—not physical presence—informs what procedural rights are available to an alien.” Put simply, aliens seeking admission to the U.S. do not have the same Due Process rights as those who have already been lawfully admitted.
“Against this backdrop, Petitioners’ contention that they possess a core, enumerated interest in ‘freedom from physical restraint,’ accruing because of the length of their residence here and their significant ties to the country and their communities, becomes untenable,” wrote Wilson.
The opinion highlighted another Supreme Court ruling, which noted that “deportation proceedings ‘would be [in] vain if those accused could not be held in custody pending the inquiry into their true character.’”
Judge James Ho, concurring, wrote that “[a] nation ceases to be a nation if it can’t protect its borders. Congress has chosen to police our borders by detaining illegal aliens found in our country pending their removal proceedings.”
For these reasons, the en banc Fifth Circuit court ruled that the panel was wrong to grant the aliens relief.
“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,” the order concluded. “Accordingly, we reverse the district courts’ decisions and vacate their grants of habeas relief.”
The court also answered the government’s request to determine when an alien’s detention without a bond hearing would violate Due Process rights.
“So long as an alien’s detention pending removal ‘ha[s] a definite termination point’—removal or release—his or her continued confinement without bond hearing does not offend due process,” reads the opinion.
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