Habeas and squatter’s rights

Democratic federal judges are inventing new legal doctrines to free illegal aliens from ICE detention. From Politico,

Federal judges may have found a workaround to reject the Trump administration’s mass detention policy after an appeals court backed the approach.

A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday blessed the administration’s interpretation of the government’s power to systematically detain people targeted for deportation — even if they have no criminal records and have lived in the country for decades.

As my friends would say, “Stop the Tape!” If you, a noncitizen, are in the United States without authorization, you are committing a federal crime. There is no exception in the law for successfully evading the law for decades (or years or months) and/or for having an otherwise clean criminal record in America. You are a criminal.

The law is crystal clear, “shall be detained,” so judges bent on ignoring the law have to be ever more clever. Politico reports that two district-level judges within the 5th circuit (TX-LA-MS) have invented a new constitutional right which prevents ICE from,

detaining people who have established roots in the U.S. without due process. Those roots amount, in legal parlance, to a “liberty interest” that the Constitution says cannot be taken away without at least a hearing before a neutral judge.

I’m otherwise a big fan of “liberty,” but these judges have manufactured a squatter’s right to remain in America without permission. Keep in mind that detainees have already received all of the process to which they are due, that is, they have been ordered removed by an Immigration Court.

One district judge wrote,

The Court reiterates its original holding that noncitizens who have ‘established connections’ in the United States by virtue of living in the country for a substantial period acquire a liberty interest in being free from government detention without due process of law.

And how does he decide when a connection has been established that overrides federal law? Is it de facto citizenship? Common law citizenship? Can these noncitizens now vote?

Back in Minnesota, we are now up to 862 habeas cases filed so far in 2026.