Reported / Citable
Background
Johannet Jafeet Barreto Marquez, a Venezuelan national, entered the United States in March 2023. He was initially detained, placed in formal removal proceedings under 8 U.S.C. § 1229a, and then released into the country. He lived in the United States interior for over two years before ICE re-detained him in August 2025—this time without affording him a bond hearing.
The re-detention followed a significant policy reversal by the government. In July 2025, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons issued an internal memorandum announcing that noncitizens who entered without inspection would henceforth be classified as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b), rather than discretionary detention under § 1226(a), which had historically entitled such individuals to bond hearings. The Board of Immigration Appeals endorsed this interpretation in Matter of Yajure Hurtado, 29 I. & N. Dec. 216 (BIA 2025). In February 2026, the Fifth Circuit upheld the statutory basis for this policy in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, No. 25-20496 (5th Cir. Feb. 6, 2026), but explicitly declined to address the constitutional due process question.
Barreto Marquez filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the Western District of Texas, arguing that his detention without any individualized hearing violated both the INA and his Fifth Amendment right to procedural due process. The government responded that § 1225(b) mandates his detention and that he possesses no due process right to a bond hearing as an unadmitted applicant for admission.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Xavier Rodriguez granted the habeas petition on procedural due process grounds and ordered Respondents to release Barreto Marquez no later than June 18, 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 decision addressed only the statutory question and left the constitutional due process issue entirely open. Because government counsel had expressly conceded during oral argument in Buenrostro-Mendez that no due process claim was before the Fifth Circuit, the court rejected the government’s argument that Buenrostro-Mendez “rejected” petitioner’s constitutional claims.
Applying Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319 (1976), the court found that all three factors favor the petitioner. The private interest at stake—freedom from physical restraint—is among the most fundamental liberties protected by the Due Process Clause. The risk of erroneous deprivation is substantial given that the government previously found Barreto Marquez to be neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community when it released him after his initial apprehension. And the government’s interest in streamlined detention procedures does not outweigh the minimal burden of conducting an individualized hearing. Consistent with a growing consensus among district courts within the Fifth Circuit, the court held that detaining a noncitizen with substantial presence in the United States interior—without any individualized assessment of dangerousness or flight risk—violates procedural due process.
The court also held that the Supreme Court’s decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. 103 (2020), does not foreclose this claim. Thuraissigiam‘s “entry fiction”—which limits due process rights for noncitizens treated as stopped at the border—applies to challenges to admission and removal proceedings, not to challenges to detention of noncitizens who have established substantial presence in the country’s interior. Unlike Thuraissigiam, who was seized within twenty-five yards of the border and never released, Barreto Marquez entered the country, was released by the government, and lived in the United States for more than two years before re-detention. The court expressly departed from its prior rulings in Canales-Melgar v. Noem and Goguev v. Noem, in which it had applied the entry fiction to the detention of similar noncitizens.
Key Takeaways
- The Fifth Circuit’s Buenrostro-Mendez ruling bars only statutory challenges to § 1225(b) detention of interior-present noncitizens; it does not foreclose—and expressly left open—constitutional due process challenges.
- Noncitizens who were released into the United States interior and established substantial presence here are constitutionally distinguishable from aliens at the threshold of initial entry; Thuraissigiam‘s entry fiction governs admission determinations, not the right to an individualized detention hearing.
- All three Mathews v. Eldridge factors support requiring a bond hearing before indefinitely detaining a noncitizen who was previously found to pose no flight risk or danger to the community.
- The government’s July 2025 policy reclassifying interior-present, entry-without-inspection noncitizens from § 1226(a) to § 1225(b)—thereby eliminating bond hearings—does not override constitutional procedural requirements.
- Courts are not bound by the government’s statutory reinterpretation when that reinterpretation produces constitutionally infirm results; legislation cannot detract from constitutional protections.
Why It Matters
This decision is part of an accelerating wave of Western District of Texas habeas grants pushing back on the government’s 2025 policy shift that reclassified hundreds of thousands of interior-present noncitizens as § 1225(b) applicants for admission and stripped them of bond-hearing rights overnight. By grounding relief in the Fifth Amendment rather than the INA, Judge Rodriguez insulates his holding from the statutory foreclosure of Buenrostro-Mendez and charts a path that other district courts in the circuit can follow regardless of how the Fifth Circuit ultimately resolves its statutory analysis.
The ruling is also significant for its explicit departure from the court’s own prior decisions applying the entry fiction to detention, reflecting the “growing consensus” among district courts that Thuraissigiam is limited to the admissibility context. As the constitutional questions suppressed by Buenrostro-Mendez percolate back up through district courts and ultimately reach the Fifth Circuit and potentially the Supreme Court, decisions like this one will form the factual and doctrinal record for that review. Practitioners representing detained noncitizens who were previously released into the interior should closely track the developing circuit-level landscape on the unresolved due process question.