The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Tuesday weighed in on the contentious issue of illegal migrants and Second Amendment rights. The three-judge panel ruled that those in the country unlawfully do not possess the right to keep and bear arms enjoyed by law-abiding citizens.
The case stemmed from the 2022 arrest of a Mexican man, Jose Paz Medina-Cantu, by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas. He was charged with unlawfully re-entering the country after having been deported and illegal possession of a firearm.
Medina-Paz pleaded guilty and received a 15-month prison sentence. However, he reserved the right to appeal the gun charge based on the Second Amendment.
His lawyers utilized the novel argument that the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision shielded their client from prosecution for illegal possession of a handgun.
Bruen established that the nation’s gun control laws must be aligned with its history and tradition of firearm regulation. This monumental decision resulted in several government overreaches being tossed aside.
However, the appellant’s arguments fell on deaf ears in the Fifth Circuit. The panel determined that Bruen and other high court decisions “did not unequivocally abrogate our precedent that the plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass illegal aliens.”
In 2011, the Fifth Circuit upheld the federal ban on possession of firearms by those in the U.S. illegally. U.S. v. Portillo-Munoz involved another illegal alien arrested on gun charges, and the appeals court ruled that the Bill of Rights did not protect him.
The panel noted that the previous decision “is constitutional under the Second Amendment, reasoning that the phrase ‘the people’ in the Second Amendment does not include aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”
This determination followed the politically charged ruling by U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in March that the prohibition violated the Second Amendment.
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