PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A Philadelphia federal appeals court said ICE violated federal immigration law and the Fifth Amendment with a policy enacted last summer that allowed the agency to detain undocumented immigrants who had lived in the United States for years without a hearing.
In a 2-1 ruling, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals shot down one of the Trump administration’s biggest cogs at the center of its efforts to ramp up deportations across the U.S.
The policy enacted last summer by the administration called for holding undocumented immigrants who had been in the U.S. for years in detention without them needing a hearing in front of a judge. The appeals court ruled that the policy violated both federal immigration law and the Fifth Amendment.
In the majority opinion, Judge Patty Schwartz wrote that undocumented immigrants who have long been in the U.S. are “entitled to due process beyond those provided to noncitizens at the border.”
Schwartz was joined in the majority by Judge Theodore McKee. The lone dissent was Judge Jennifer Mascott, who argued the ruling went against federal immigration law.
Miguel Andrade, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, said in a statement to KYW Newsradio that the ruling was an “important affirmation of a basic principle: That immigration status does not erase a person’s constitutional rights.”
The case ruled on by the appeals court involved two undocumented immigrants who had been in the U.S. for decades and were detained by ICE not long after the Trump policy took effect. Neither had criminal records.
“At a time when federal immigration enforcement [ICE] is pushing aggressively against legal and constitutional limits, every layer of protection matters,” Andrade wrote. “We should celebrate this decision, while also recognizing that communities need those protections reinforced at every level — from the courts to strong local safeguards like Philadelphia’s ICE OUT laws.”
