Reported / Citable
Background
Cinthya Alejandra Mendoza Macias, a Mexican national, entered the United States without inspection in April 2011 and had lived continuously in the country for approximately fifteen years. On April 23, 2026, she was arrested and detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, without a bond hearing. She filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus arguing her detention violated the Immigration and Nationality Act and her constitutional right to procedural due process.
Her detention arose from a significant policy shift that began in July 2025, when Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE, issued an internal memorandum declaring that noncitizens present in the United States without having been admitted or paroled—who for nearly three decades had been treated as eligible for bond hearings under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a)—are instead subject to mandatory detention without any bond hearing under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b). The Board of Immigration Appeals codified this reversal in Matter of Yajure Hurtado, 29 I. & N. Dec. 216 (BIA 2025). In February 2026, the Fifth Circuit upheld this statutory interpretation in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, foreclosing INA-based challenges in the circuit.
The government argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. 103 (2020), barred Petitioner’s due process claim entirely under the “entry fiction”—the doctrine that noncitizens who entered illegally are treated, for due process purposes, as if they were stopped at the border and thus have only the statutory rights Congress has provided. The government also contended that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Buenrostro-Mendez foreclosed all challenges to Petitioner’s detention.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Xavier Rodriguez granted the petition and ordered Petitioner released by June 3, 2026, under conditions no more restrictive than those in place before her April 2026 detention. Although the court dismissed Petitioner’s statutory claims as foreclosed by Buenrostro-Mendez, it held that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling expressly left the constitutional due process question open—government counsel had conceded at oral argument that only the statutory issue was before the Fifth Circuit—and that district courts remained obligated to adjudicate those constitutional claims in the first instance, consistent with the Supreme Court’s instructions in Jennings v. Rodriguez and Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez.
Applying Mathews v. Eldridge‘s three-factor balancing test, the court found that all three factors—the significant private liberty interest at stake, the high risk of erroneous deprivation absent any individualized assessment of flight risk or dangerousness, and the relatively modest burden an individualized bond hearing imposes on the government—weighed in Petitioner’s favor. The court rejected the government’s reliance on Thuraissigiam‘s “entry fiction,” distinguishing that case on two critical grounds: (1) Thuraissigiam addressed only the process due in admission and removal proceedings, not the separate question of detention, and (2) the petitioner there was apprehended twenty-five yards from the border and never released into the interior, while Mendoza Macias had lived in the United States for fifteen years and developed the substantial connections that trigger full Fifth Amendment protections under Zadvydas v. Davis and United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez.
Notably, the court expressly departed from its own prior decisions in Canales-Melgar v. Noem and Goguev v. Noem, in which it had applied the “entry fiction” to bar due process challenges by noncitizens with substantial interior presence, citing a growing district-court consensus rejecting that approach and further reflection on the applicable law.
Key Takeaways
- The Fifth Circuit’s Buenrostro-Mendez decision bars INA-based statutory challenges to mandatory detention under § 1225(b) in the circuit, but does not foreclose constitutional due process challenges—those remain live and must be adjudicated by district courts.
- Thuraissigiam‘s “entry fiction” limiting due process rights applies to the admission process and removal proceedings; it does not strip long-term interior residents of their Fifth Amendment right to an individualized bond hearing before continued civil detention.
- Under Mathews v. Eldridge, mandatory detention of noncitizens with substantial U.S. presence—without any individualized determination of flight risk or danger to the community—violates procedural due process; the government’s July 2025 policy reversal (the “Lyons Memo” and BIA’s Matter of Yajure Hurtado) cannot override constitutional requirements.
- A noncitizen’s substantial connections to the United States, established either by years of interior residence or by prior government parole, confer constitutional protections that distinguish their situation from that of a newly arrived border crosser.
Why It Matters
This decision is part of a rapidly developing body of district-court case law responding to the federal government’s mid-2025 shift in immigration detention policy. For attorneys representing detained noncitizens who entered without inspection and have since lived in the United States, the ruling provides a template for habeas litigation: even where the Fifth Circuit has closed the door on statutory bond-hearing claims, a procedural due process challenge grounded in Mathews v. Eldridge remains viable for clients who can demonstrate substantial U.S. presence. The decision also reflects a growing judicial consensus that the mandatory-detention regime, as newly interpreted, cannot be insulated from constitutional scrutiny simply by classifying long-term residents as “applicants for admission.”
The court’s explicit repudiation of its own prior holdings in Canales-Melgar and Goguev—and its careful parsing of Thuraissigiam, Buenrostro-Mendez, and the government’s oral concessions before the Fifth Circuit—offers a detailed analytical framework that practitioners and other district courts will likely cite as circuit-level resolution of the constitutional question remains pending.