A US appeals court has ruled that immigration officials cannot keep people in detention for more than 90 days without giving them a chance to ask for release on bond. The decision is a setback for the Trump administration’s tough immigration detention policy and could affect thousands of migrants held in Texas, Louisiana and other states covered by the court.
In a 2-1 ruling on Thursday, the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said the government must explain in court why a person should continue to be held without bond.
Trump government must justify continued detention
Writing for the majority, Judge Leslie H. Southwick, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, said a bond hearing must be held within 90 days of a person’s detention. “Our only requirement is that a hearing must be held within 90 days of the commencement of detention and that at the hearing, the Government must articulate an individualised justification for further detention without bond,” Southwick wrote.
She said the government must prove that the immigrant is either a danger to the community, likely to flee, or “assert another justification why an unadmitted alien must be detained.”
Court draws a distinction
The judges said federal immigration law allows the government to keep people who have recently crossed the US-Mexico border in detention until they are deported. However, the court said the situation is different for undocumented immigrants who have already built their lives in the United States before being arrested. It ruled that these people are protected by the US Constitution’s due process rights and cannot be held indefinitely without a chance to challenge their detention.
Judge James E. Graves Jr., who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, agreed with the ruling but said even a 90-day wait is too long. “There is much that could be said about the troubling conditions noncitizens are currently experiencing, in what amounts to an appalling lack of humanity shown to our fellow human beings,” Graves wrote.
Judge Leslie Southwick pointed to a 2001 US Supreme Court ruling and said it clearly showed that constitutional protections apply to all people, including the two Mexican citizens and one Honduran citizen whose cases were before the court.
“It is part of the historic majesty of this long-ago founding charter 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,” Southwick wrote. He was appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush, the judge said, according to Reuters.
Judge Cory Wilson, a Trump appointee, disagreed with the decision. In his dissent, he said he would not allow the release of undocumented immigrants because they are “not entitled to challenge their detention under” current immigration law.
How the legal fight began
The case involved three men who were arrested by Texas state troopers during routine traffic stops between November 2025 and February 2026. The three men, named Ignacio Sosnava Rodriguez, Miguel Angel Gomez Alvarado and Alejandro Villegas Angel, had each lived in the United States for at least 14 years. They had jobs and were raising children who are US citizens.
After their arrests, the troopers handed them over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which kept them in detention without allowing them to appear before a judge.
The men were later released after federal judges ruled that keeping them in detention without a bond hearing violated their constitutional due process rights.
The Trump administration appealed those rulings, arguing that under a policy introduced in July 2025, federal immigration law requires undocumented immigrants to remain in detention until they are deported, without being given bond hearings.
The detention policy has led to a record number of legal challenges. According to ProPublica, immigrants filed nearly 47,000 habeas corpus petitions during the first 13 months of the second Trump administration. That is more than the total filed during the previous three administrations combined. Around one in every five of those cases was filed in federal courts in Texas.
Issue now headed to Supreme Court
The Trump administration has appealed several of these cases, leading to conflicting decisions in different federal appeals courts. Before Thursday’s ruling, three federal appeals courts had already ruled against the administration’s policy, while two had upheld it. Another appeals court remains split on the issue.