A federal immigration agent tackles a protester to the ground in Minneapolis, in February 2026. | Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images

Two judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a court dominated by MAGA Republicans, just handed the Trump administration broad authority to lock up millions of immigrants — provided that it can get those immigrants to Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi.

In the short term, the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi is likely to accelerate the Trump administration’s already-common practice of taking people arrested in Minnesota and other places, and moving them to Texas where their lawsuits seeking release will be heard by the Trump-aligned Fifth Circuit.

Should the Supreme Court embrace the Fifth Circuit’s reading of federal law, moreover, it will mean that virtually any person captured by federal immigration enforcement will be locked in a detention facility for months or longer, regardless of their ties to the United States or, in many cases, the merits of their claim that they are lawfully entitled to remain in this country.

Buenrostro-Mendez turns on two provisions of federal law, one of which applies to non-citizens who are “seeking admission” to the United States, and another which applies to the “apprehension and detention of aliens” within the US interior. The first provision says that many immigrants seeking admission at the border must be held in a detention facility while the legal proceedings that will determine whether they may enter are pending. The later provision, meanwhile, typically permits immigrants who are arrested inside the US to be released on bond.

For nearly 30 years, after these provisions became law in 1996, every presidential administration including the first Trump administration read immigration law to call for mandatory detention only for certain immigrants “seeking admission” at the border, because that’s what the law actually says. But last July, the Trump administration announced that all immigrants who are found in the United States without being lawfully admitted at the border will be automatically detained.

Since then, the overwhelming majority of federal judges have rejected this new reading of the statute. According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, “at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.” These judges are spread throughout the country, and many of the judges who rejected the administration’s novel reading of the statute are Republicans.

Many of these cases arise out of President Donald Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis, where federal courts have rejected Trump’s reading of immigration law and ordered immigrants........

© Vox