In a long-overdue rebuke of judicial activism, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed the Trump administration a major win Friday, ruling that immigration authorities may detain illegal immigrants without automatic bond hearings while deportation proceedings are underway — even if those individuals have lived in the United States for decades.
The 2–1 decision marks the first time a federal appeals court has upheld the administration’s mandatory-detention policy, reversing two lower-court rulings and cutting directly against the grain of hundreds of activist decisions nationwide that invented rights Congress never granted.
For years, federal judges have treated immigration law as optional, repeatedly overriding statute with personal policy preferences and forcing releases that Congress explicitly sought to prevent. The Fifth Circuit did what too few courts have been willing to do: read the law as written and enforce it.
The ruling’s impact is immediate and sweeping — especially in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, states that house the largest concentration of immigration detention facilities in the country. For thousands of illegal immigrants who were previously released on bond while their deportation cases dragged on, that loophole is now closed. Detention is mandatory until the case is resolved — however long that takes.
According to CNN, immigrants who had been living unlawfully in the U.S. may now be denied bond hearings altogether. What they leave out is the obvious point: being here illegally was never supposed to come with a presumption of release.
At the center of the case are Victor Buenrostro-Mendez and Jose Padron Covarrubias, both Mexican nationals who entered the country illegally — in 2009 and 2001, respectively. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained them in 2025, both demanded bond hearings. ICE denied the requests, relying on a September 2025 Board of Immigration Appeals ruling that correctly reinterpreted decades-old immigration law as it was actually written.
Both men had originally won their cases in district court, where judges ordered their release or granted them bond hearings. However, Friday’s appellate ruling overturned those decisions.
The ruling stands in stark contrast to a wave of decisions from district courts. According to Politico, at least 360 federal judges have rejected the Trump administration’s expanded detention policy in over 3,000 cases, while only 27 judges have supported it in about 130 cases.
The shift in policy has led to what one government lawyer described as a “tsunami” of habeas corpus petitions inundating federal courts across the country. In Minneapolis, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz recently accused ICE of breaching nearly 100 court orders that were directing the release of detainees.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi called Friday’s decision “a significant blow against activist judges who have been undermining our efforts to make America safe again at every turn,” according to Reuters.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote that “activist judges have ordered the release of alien after alien based on the false claim that DHS was breaking the law. Today, the first court of appeals to address the question ruled that @DHSGov was right all along.”
The ruling from the Fifth Circuit is limited to its jurisdiction, which includes Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Meanwhile, other federal appeals courts are examining similar challenges, such as the Seventh Circuit, which issued a preliminary ruling last year that opposed the administration’s interpretation.
Legal experts believe this issue is likely to reach the Supreme Court due to its nationwide significance and the potential for a circuit split to develop.