President Donald Trump’s lawyers scored big on Friday when a Texas-based appeals court allowed officials to hold arrested migrants in detention so their migration cases can be quickly decided.
“ENORMOUS Immigration win for President Trump,” said Eric Wessen, the Solicitor General in Iowa’s Attorney General’s Office. He added:
The Fifth Circuit, the first federal court to address President Trump’s expedited removal efforts, sides with the administration. Illegal aliens may be detained and removed!
The 2:1 decision “is a big deal,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer at the Manhattan Institute.
“After reviewing carefully the relevant provisions and structure of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, the statutory history, and Congressional intent, we conclude that the government’s position is correct,” the three-judge court decided.
One Biden-nominated judge argued that the policy is unfair because prior presidents did not use the law:
The majority stakes the largest detention initiative in American history on the possibility that “seeking admission” is like being an “applicant for admission,” in a [1996] statute that has never been applied in this way, based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained—some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.
The decision is a big blow to the many pro-migration lawyers who are using sympathetic judges to impose a catch-and-release burden on ICE enforcement. So the decision helps Trump implement his campaign promise to deport millions of illegal migrants, partly because they are a huge economic burden on ordinary American families.
“AWFUL news for due process,” complained Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer with a pro-migration advocacy group, adding:
Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi are already detention black holes. [Migrant] Release will be more difficult than ever. As more [migrants] are locked up, ICE will increase the pressure on those who are detained to give up. The goal is an assembly line of coercion with no day in court.
This decision puts even more pressure on plaintiffs and district courts outside the 5th Circuit. Unless the habeas is filed before a person is transferred to the 5th Circuit, a person may remain locked in appalling conditions, never even allowed to ask for bond [release]. This decision will wipe out the availability of release through bond for tens of thousands of people detained in or transported to Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi by ICE.
In Minnesota, for example, more than 700 “habeas corpus petitions” have been filed by pro-migration lawyers seeking to spring long-term migrants from ICE detention. Judges have justified many migrant releases by citing pro-release policies from prior administrations. This week, for example, progressives cheered when a judge ordered the quick release of an Ecuadorian economic migrant — and the child he brought from Ecuador — from detention in Texas.
The releases are prompted by a huge number of lawyers who work for pro-migration groups, said Bill Glahn, at the Center of the American Experiment in Minnesota. Their strategy is “just flood the zone, overwhelm the system, and then … you win,” he told Breitbart News.
DHS officials say that detention is important because it allows them to quickly decide each migrant’s legal claims and then to safely and cheaply deport them.
The court’s decision only applies to migrants detained in the district overseen by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Texas. But a similar lawsuit is pending in the Eighth Circuit, which stretches from Arkansas to North Dakota and Minnesota.
The Democrats’ pushback against Trump’s deportations is an indirect attack on Trump’s low-migration, high-productivity national economic strategy and his 2026 policy on affordability.
Under Trump’s low-migration, high-deportation reforms, Americans’ wages are up, housing costs are down, inflation is declining, transport costs are shrinking, crime is dropping, and corporations are spending heavily to help Americans become more productive and earn more wages for each working hour.
RestaurantBusinessOnline.com reported on January 23 that Trump’s deputies are raising voters’ wages by deporting illegal migrants: “Fewer workers mean restaurants will once again have to compete for employees the only way they can, by paying higher wages. Wages over the next two years are expected to accelerate, according to Oxford Economics, from 3.7% this year to 5.6% by 2027.”
The pro-citizen, pro-wage policy is deeply opposed by Democrats, who instead promise to raise living standards for migrants and citizens via government benefits.
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