The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled on Thursday that immigrants held in custody for more than 90 days must be given a hearing to ask for release on bail, a decision that could alter detention practice across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The court said keeping someone locked up that long without a hearing violates due process protections.
The ruling could reach thousands of immigrants in the court’s territory, including hundreds of pending cases in Texas. It also comes from a two-to-one split that drew a sharp line between the majority and the dissent. Judge Leslie Southwick wrote for the court that the Constitution protects basic rights for everyone inside the United States regardless of immigration status, and Judge James Graves joined him. Judge Cory Wilson disagreed, saying the decision cuts into Congress’s authority over immigration policy.
That legal fight grew out of a 2025 reinterpretation of immigration law adopted by the Department of Homeland Security. For decades, mandatory detention without bail had mainly applied to people held when entering the country or soon after crossing the border. Under the later reading, the Trump administration expanded the rule to immigrants arrested inside the United States, even those who had lived there for years or decades while facing deportation proceedings. The Board of Immigration Appeals then adopted that criterion, allowing immigration judges to order mandatory detention without giving people a chance to request bail.
The Fifth Circuit did not strike down that interpretation. Instead, it said prolonged detention requires a hearing, while leaving the underlying reading of the law in place. That leaves the court’s next task unresolved: how those hearings will work, and what standard judges will use when deciding whether a detainee should be released.
For people held under the court’s jurisdiction, the practical effect is immediate. The ruling changes the rules for detention in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and it could force new bail hearings in cases that have already been moving through the system without one. What remains unsettled is whether the new hearings will become a narrow safeguard or a broader check on how long immigrants can be held before a judge hears their case.
