The full Fifth Circuit upheld the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory detention for noncitizens, saying in a split decision Friday that constitutional due process protections didn’t entitle three migrant men to bond hearings in immigration court.

While the petitioners have Fifth Amendment rights, they haven’t been admitted to the US and so aren’t entitled to procedures beyond what’s spelled out in immigration statutes, wrote Trump-appointed Judge Cory Wilson in an opinion joined by eight of his colleagues. A ninth, Judge Priscilla Richman, concurred with the result of the majority opinion.

Echoing a point frequently made by Trump administration officials, Wilson wrote that noncitizens can be released from detention “at any moment by agreeing to leave the country.”

Furthermore, the length of their stay in immigration detention “presented no constitutional issues” warranting their release, Wilson wrote.

Seven judges, all appointed by Democrats or Republican President George W. Bush, dissented, with Judge Leslie Southwick saying the majority built “an impenetrable wall between the Constitution and these long-term residents.”

The decision marks another significant Fifth Circuit win for the Trump administration, which has used the detention policy as a legal cornerstone of its mass-deportation efforts. Thousands of immigrants are detained in Fifth Circuit states, particularly Texas and Louisiana, and the court is an outlier among appellate circuits in upholding the policy.

Only one other circuit has blessed the policy, while nine have ruled against it.

The Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether Trump’s mandatory detention scheme correctly interprets the statute, a separate legal question than the Fifth Circuit considered in Friday’s decision.

Attorneys for the noncitizen petitioners castigated the decision in a statement Friday.

“At a time when conditions in immigration detention are increasingly dangerous, this ruling opens the door to more people being locked up for no reason, with devastating consequences for them, their loved ones, and their community,” said Ellie Norton of the National Immigration Project.

The Fifth Circuit previously found there’s no statutory right to a bond hearing in such cases. Congress has significant power over immigration issues and is free to make rules for noncitizens that wouldn’t be acceptable for citizens, Wilson wrote.

“Controlling illegal immigration is, no doubt, an important and controversial issue of public policy. But the Constitution entrusts broad authority to delineate immigration policy, and to design proceedings to effectuate those policy choices, to Congress — not courts,” Wilson said. “Neither we nor the district courts are free to ignore that bedrock principle and rewrite the immigration policy Congress has enacted.”

Last year, in a departure from nearly three decades of practice, the Trump administration began to classify noncitizens who have long lived within US borders as “seeking admission,” the same as noncitizens who’d just entered the country — a legal interpretation that denied them bond hearings.

That helped spark a flood of immigrant habeas corpus petitions in which noncitizens argued they were being illegally detained.

In a concurrence, Judge James Ho wrote that courts, unlike Congress, shouldn’t have a say over immigration policies.

“These habeas petitions, far from affirming American liberty, are profoundly un-American — because they send the message that the only people who are above the law in our country are the ones who violated our laws to get in,” said Ho, a Trump appointee.

Judge Andrew Oldham, another Trump appointee, wrote a lengthy response to Judge Dana Douglas’ assertion that the majority opinion relies on “sham history.”

The writ of habeas corpus doesn’t define “the strike zone,” which is left up to “Congress, and Congress alone,” he said. “Congress can expand it or contract it, as it has over time. But what Congress says goes, and the Constitution does nothing to change what counts as a ball or a strike.”

In dissent, Southwick said that while detention can be a valid part of deportation proceedings, there’s no support for the idea that a noncitizen can be locked up for as long as they’re pending, “however delayed,” with no option for possible release. Southwick was joined by Douglas and Judges Carl Stewart, James Graves Jr., Stephen Higginson, Irma Carillo Ramirez.

Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, Southwick wrote, a noncitizen’s “presence and residence” in the country — not their technical “admission” to it — entitles them to due process.

Judge Catharina Haynes said she agreed with Southwick’s “basic points” but stressed that his logic should apply only to residents like the petitioners, who’ve been in the country for more than a decade, have no criminal history, and have US citizen relatives.

Douglas also wrote a separate dissent, joined by Stewart, Graves, Higginson, and Ramirez. The majority opinion “detonates the core of the Due Process Clause,” she wrote.

“A country where a roaming police force must seek out millions of noncitizens for mandatory detention without meaningful process or recourse to even a rudimentary hearing is a less decent place for people like Petitioners who have led law-abiding lives, committed no crimes, and raised United States citizens,” she wrote.

Higginson wrote separately, joined by five fellow dissenters, to say that the court was wrong in the first place when it upheld the Trump detention policy on statutory grounds. The en banc court should have revisited the statutory question and interpreted the law in a way that doesn’t raise such significant constitutional concerns, he said.

Ho’s concurrence in particular “implies that any judicial inquiry into the constitutionality of executive immigration detention impermissibly injures Congress,” Higginson wrote. “That proposition cannot be true.”

The due process question came to the court after district court judges began granting noncitizen habeas claims even after the Fifth Circuit panel upheld the Trump policy on statutory grounds.

When the government challenged those grants at the Fifth Circuit, a panel agreed that due process required bond hearings. But the en banc court threw out that decision and agreed to hear the due process arguments as a full court.

Noncitizen petitioners are also represented by American Immigration Council and Garza & Narvaez PLLC.

The case is Sosnava Rodriguez v. Ortega, 5th Cir., No. 26-50183, opinion 10/23/26.