On February 6, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, interpreting an immigration statute to permit the federal government to detain thousands and possibly millions of noncitizens without giving them a hearing to ask an Immigration Judge for release on bond.
During the second Trump administration, the federal government has been detaining thousands of noncitizens primarily by using an immigration statute called 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A), better known as Section 235(b)(2)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
For about the last 30 years, it was understood that Section 235(b)(2)(A) applied only to noncitizens who, at the time of their arrest, were seeking to enter the United States unlawfully. Under the second Trump administration, however, the federal government used Section 235(b)(2)(A) to detain without hearings even noncitizens who had entered the United States unlawfully, but who had not been seeking to enter the United States for years at the time of their arrest. The federal government’s interpretation drew no distinction between a noncitizen arrested minutes after crossing the border and the noncitizen who had built a life in the United States over the years and even decades. The noncitizens in Buenrostro-Mendez, for example, had been in the United States for at least 16 years prior to their arrest and detention.
In Buenrostro-Mendez, the Fifth Circuit addressed the narrow question as to whether the federal government’s interpretation of Section 235(b)(2)(A) was consistent with the plain language of that statute. Equating the act of seeking entry into the United States with waiting for a response to a college application, the Fifth Circuit sided with the federal government. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling was a stark departure from the thousands of rulings from federal district courts across the nation rejecting the federal government’s interpretation. Nonetheless, the Fifth Circuit did not address the separate question of whether the federal government’s interpretation of Section 235(b)(2)(A) would violate a noncitizen’s due process rights under the U.S. Constitution.
Other federal appeals courts are currently weighing in on the narrow question presented to the Fifth Circuit in Buenrostro-Mendez. If one or more of those other courts reaches a different answer to that question, this question will likely need a definitive answer from the U.S. Supreme Court.