A federal appellate court has ruled that the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution requires illegal aliens to be provided a bond hearing within 90 days of detainment while awaiting removal proceedings.
Under a federal statute now found to have been in conflict with due process rights, certain aliens were required to be detained until the conclusion of removal proceedings. The decision will place a significant burden on the executive branch, which the court has tasked with performing such hearings.
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.”
Under this statute, a bond hearing would be moot.
In each of the three 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.”
Nothing in the orders, however, interfered with the removal proceedings themselves.
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.
The Ruling
On July 2, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the lower court rulings, finding that illegal aliens are entitled to a bond hearing within 90 days of detention under the “all persons” language of the Due Process Clause.
“It is part of the historic majesty of this long-ago founding charter that it makes no exceptions in providing basic rights to those within our boundaries, including a right to be heard when personal liberty is taken,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.
“The Constitution, after all, is supreme, with statutes’ needing to conform to its dictates, not the Constitution to statutes,” Southwick continued. “We AFFIRM the district courts’ granting writs of habeas corpus.”
This ruling affects far more individuals than the three aliens in the case. The Department of Homeland Security has detained thousands of resident aliens under the aforementioned federal statute, all of whom are now entitled to a bond hearing.
The court determined that it is the responsibility of the executive branch, rather than district courts, to provide these hearings through its own procedures—shifting the burden from district courts.
Notably, these hearings are only to justify continued detention while removal proceedings are ongoing. Should aliens be released from detention, their removal proceedings will continue unaffected.
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