Reported / Citable
Background
Alexis Noel Baltodano Gusman, a Honduran national, entered the United States without inspection in February 2024. He was detained, placed in full removal proceedings under 8 U.S.C. § 1229a, and then released into the country. On December 30, 2025, he was arrested at a routine immigration check-in and re-detained at the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Karnes City, Texas — this time without a bond hearing.
His detention without a hearing reflected a policy shift that had emerged mid-2025. In July 2025, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons issued an internal memorandum reversing nearly three decades of agency practice, declaring that noncitizens who entered without inspection are “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b) rather than discretionary detention under § 1226(a), which carries a right to a bond hearing. The Board of Immigration Appeals codified this position in Matter of Yajure Hurtado, 29 I. & N. Dec. 216 (BIA 2025). In February 2026, the Fifth Circuit upheld the statutory basis for this interpretation in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, No. 25-20496 (5th Cir. Feb. 6, 2026), but expressly did not reach the constitutional due process question.
Baltodano Gusman filed a pro se habeas petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, arguing his continued detention without a bond hearing violated both the INA and his constitutional right to procedural due process. The government opposed the petition, contending that his classification as an applicant for admission stripped him of entitlement to a bond hearing and that Thuraissigiam‘s “entry fiction” foreclosed his due process claims.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Xavier Rodriguez granted the petition and ordered Baltodano Gusman released by June 19, 2026, under conditions no more restrictive than those in place before his re-detention. The court dismissed the petitioner’s statutory claims as foreclosed by Buenrostro-Mendez, but held that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling left the constitutional due process question entirely open — a point confirmed by government counsel’s concession at oral argument in that case that no due process claim was before the Fifth Circuit.
Applying the three-factor balancing test from Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319 (1976), the court found that detaining a noncitizen with substantial presence in the United States — who had been previously assessed as neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community before being released — without any individualized bond hearing violates procedural due process. The court also distinguished Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. 103 (2020), on two grounds: Baltodano Gusman was challenging his detention, not his admission or removal proceedings, and his extended presence in the United States interior, following government release, gave him constitutional protections that do not apply to noncitizens apprehended at or immediately upon crossing the border.
The court explicitly departed from its own prior holdings in Canales-Melgar v. Noem and Goguev v. Noem, acknowledging that a growing consensus of district court decisions and further consideration of the law warranted abandoning those decisions’ application of the “entry fiction” to the detention context.
Key Takeaways
- The Fifth Circuit’s decision in Buenrostro-Mendez forecloses statutory challenges to mandatory detention of interior noncitizens under § 1225(b), but it does not foreclose constitutional due process challenges — the constitutional question was expressly not presented to or decided by the Fifth Circuit.
- Thuraissigiam‘s “entry fiction,” which limits due process rights in the admission context, does not apply to noncitizens who have been released into the interior and established substantial presence in the United States; those individuals retain Fifth Amendment procedural due process rights with respect to their detention.
- Under Mathews v. Eldridge, detaining such individuals without any individualized assessment of flight risk or dangerousness — particularly those previously cleared and released by the government itself — violates procedural due process, and they must be afforded a bond hearing if re-detained.
- The INA’s jurisdiction-stripping provisions (§§ 1252(g), 1252(b)(9), 1225(b)(4), and 1226(e)) do not deprive federal courts of habeas jurisdiction over detention challenges, as opposed to challenges to removal proceedings or discretionary detention decisions.
Why It Matters
This decision adds to a rapidly growing body of district court authority holding that the government’s mid-2025 policy shift — reclassifying interior noncitizens as § 1225(b) “applicants for admission” ineligible for bond hearings — runs into a constitutional wall when applied to individuals who have lived in the United States interior and were previously vetted and released by the government. While the Fifth Circuit’s Buenrostro-Mendez ruling resolved the statutory debate against detained noncitizens, it left the constitutional due process question unresolved, and district courts across the circuit are now filling that gap in ways that consistently favor detainees with substantial U.S. presence.
Practitioners should note that the court also explicitly reversed its own prior rulings, signaling judicial recognition that the “entry fiction” doctrine has been pressed well beyond its proper scope. Until the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court addresses the due process question directly, attorneys representing detained noncitizens with significant time in the United States interior have a viable constitutional avenue for release — even where the statutory path is closed.