Reported / Citable
Background
Andrea Gabriela Alarcon-Lopez, a Venezuelan national, entered the United States without inspection in September 2021. She was initially detained, placed in full removal proceedings under 8 U.S.C. § 1229a, and then released into the country. On May 11, 2026, she was re-arrested and detained at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas — this time without any bond hearing. She filed a pro se petition for writ of habeas corpus, arguing that her renewed detention violated both the Immigration and Nationality Act and her constitutional due process rights.
Her case arose against the backdrop of a significant policy shift by the Trump administration. In July 2025, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons issued an internal memorandum declaring that noncitizens present in the United States without having been admitted or paroled — including those who entered without inspection — are subject to mandatory detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b) rather than the discretionary detention framework of § 1226(a). The Board of Immigration Appeals codified this position in Matter of Yajure Hurtado, 29 I. & N. Dec. 216 (BIA 2025), eliminating bond hearings for this population. The Fifth Circuit, in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi (Feb. 6, 2026), sustained that statutory interpretation but expressly declined to address whether it violated the Constitution.
District Judge Xavier Rodriguez — who also noted he was departing from his own prior rulings in Canales-Melgar v. Noem and Goguev v. Noem — considered the constitutional question the Fifth Circuit left open and analyzed Alarcon-Lopez’s procedural due process claim under the Mathews v. Eldridge framework.
The Court’s Holding
The court granted the habeas petition and directed respondents to release Alarcon-Lopez by June 17, 2026, under conditions no more restrictive than those in place before her re-detention. The court held that detaining a noncitizen with substantial presence in the United States — who had been previously screened, found to pose no flight risk or danger, and released into the interior — without any individualized bond hearing violates the procedural due process guarantee of the Fifth Amendment. All three Mathews v. Eldridge factors weighed in the petitioner’s favor: the liberty interest at stake is fundamental; the risk of erroneous deprivation is high where no individualized assessment is made; and requiring a bond hearing imposes minimal administrative burden on the government.
The court rejected the government’s reliance on Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam (2020) and its “entry fiction,” which treats some noncitizens as if they had never entered the country for purposes of admissibility proceedings. The court identified two critical distinctions: first, Alarcon-Lopez challenges her detention, not the admission process — and Thuraissigiam addressed only the latter. Second, unlike Thuraissigiam, who was apprehended twenty-five yards from the border and never released, Alarcon-Lopez entered in 2021, was released by the government, and has lived in the United States for years, establishing substantial territorial presence sufficient to trigger the full protections of the Due Process Clause under Zadvydas v. Davis and Wong Wing v. United States.
The court also dismissed the government’s circular argument that a bond hearing is irrelevant because § 1225(b) mandates detention regardless of flight risk or dangerousness. Citing Cleveland Bd. of Educ. v. Loudermill, the court emphasized that what process is constitutionally due is not determined by the statute — legislation cannot override the Constitution. The court acknowledged that statutory challenges were foreclosed by Buenrostro-Mendez, dismissed those claims accordingly, and rested its ruling entirely on constitutional grounds.
Key Takeaways
- The Fifth Circuit’s Buenrostro-Mendez ruling that § 1225(b) authorizes mandatory detention of EWI noncitizens without bond hearings does not resolve — and expressly left open — the constitutional due process question; district courts are addressing it in the government’s disfavor.
- Noncitizens who entered without inspection but were subsequently released by the government and have established substantial presence in the United States are not “at the threshold of initial entry” for due process purposes, and Thuraissigiam‘s entry fiction does not strip them of a right to an individualized bond hearing.
- The court explicitly departed from its own prior precedent in Canales-Melgar and Goguev, citing a growing consensus among Western District of Texas judges and courts across the Fifth Circuit that detention of long-present noncitizens without any individualized assessment violates procedural due process.
- Any re-detention of Alarcon-Lopez must be preceded by a bond hearing; the order also required a government status report confirming compliance within three days.
Why It Matters
This decision is part of an accelerating wave of district court rulings pushing back on the Trump administration’s 2025 policy shift — codified through the Lyons Memo and Matter of Yajure Hurtado — that reclassified millions of long-resident undocumented noncitizens as § 1225(b) “applicants for admission” ineligible for bond hearings. Courts across the Fifth Circuit, including multiple judges in the Western District of Texas, have now consistently held that while Buenrostro-Mendez forecloses statutory arguments, it opened the door to constitutional ones — and those constitutional claims are succeeding.
The ruling highlights a fault line that will likely require circuit-level resolution: whether the “entry fiction” of Thuraissigiam — which limits due process rights for noncitizens deemed applicants for admission — extends beyond admissibility and removal proceedings to the separate question of detention for individuals who have spent years living in the United States interior. Until the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court addresses that question directly, attorneys representing detained noncitizens with substantial U.S. presence have a viable and increasingly well-supported habeas avenue for challenging bond-hearing denials on due process grounds.