A 2-1 decision from a federal appeals court has a subtly historic quality. There is no press conference when it arrives. It lands in a legal docket, gets flagged by clerks, and then slowly — sometimes suddenly — reshapes the lives of thousands of people who never expected a courtroom to notice them at all.
That’s roughly what happened on July 2, when the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Trump administration cannot hold migrants in mandatory detention for more than 90 days without granting them a bond hearing. The decision, written by Judge Leslie Southwick — a George W. Bush appointee — drew directly from constitutional bedrock. “It is part of the historic majesty of this long-ago founding charter,” Southwick said, “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.”
That line reads less like legalese and more like a reminder. A reminder that citizens are not the only ones who are entitled to due process.
The decision is the result of a change in policy that ICE discreetly made in July 2025. A three-decade-old immigration law that required mandatory detention was expanded to include residents of the country’s interior under the new interpretation. The law had previously only applied to individuals caught crossing the border. long-term inhabitants. individuals with jobs, families, mortgages, and children of school age. People who had established lives here by any reasonable standard. ICE started holding them without bond, without holding hearings, and without providing a formal means of contesting their detention.
A deluge of urgent lawsuits ensued. Judges nationwide resisted, and they resisted vigorously. In a single year, Politico tracked more than 14,300 decisions against ICE detentions. That number is not a typo. It illustrates the administration’s vigorous pursuit of this policy and the courts’ persistent opposition to it.
Here, the Fifth Circuit is important for a particular reason. The Fifth Circuit handles immigration cases in Texas, which has a disproportionate number of ICE detainees. The administration’s reinterpretation of the mandatory detention statute was actually approved by an earlier panel from the same court in February, making it the first court in the nation to do so. The decision on Thursday drew a clear constitutional line: regardless of what the law allows, the Constitution still mandates that those who are detained have a hearing. However, it did not completely reverse that statutory reading. The Fifth Amendment, Southwick’s majority concluded, doesn’t disappear at the immigration courthouse door.
In his concurrence, Judge James Graves, who was in the majority with Southwick, went one step further and recommended that bond hearings take place earlier than ninety days. The Trump appointee on the panel, Judge Cory Wilson, dissented, claiming that the government is not required by Supreme Court precedent to offer bond hearings in this situation. Later on, that dissent will probably be important.
due to the impending Supreme Court. The Trump administration has already requested that the justices address the issue and directly settle the circuit dispute. Two circuit courts have narrowly supported mandatory detention, but at least four have ruled against it when it comes to long-term residents. The stakes are very high, and the dispute is genuine. There’s a reasonable possibility this lands before the high court before the year is out.
Beyond the procedural machinery, what these cases truly look like is worth sitting with. The majority viewpoint pointed out that the majority of those apprehended under this policy have no criminal history. In no meaningful way are they flight hazards. According to the court’s own description, they are individuals who have established lives in this nation and are unlikely to flee. Detaining them in tent cities in the Texas desert, indefinitely, without a chance to speak before a judge — that’s the policy a federal court just said cannot stand.
The administration’s actual response is still unknown. The decision gives the government discretion over bond hearing standards, which may result in more legal action before the matter is fully resolved. But now the clock is in motion. 90 days. After that, someone must explain why a person is still incarcerated.
