Just five months after a federal judge ruled that a ban on gun possession by those in the country illegally was unconstitutional, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court has ruled just the opposite.
On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case against Jose Paz Medina-Cantu that Second Amendment rights do not apply to those who have entered the country illegally. Medina-Cantu was arrested in 2022 by Border Patrol agents and charged with illegally possessing a handgun and unlawfully re-entering the country after being deported.
Medina-Cantu’s attorneys used the Second Amendment defense based on the second standard of the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen. They argued that there was no historical tradition dating back to around when the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791 of disarming people based solely on their immigration status.
However, the circuit court never considered the second Bruen standard because it determined that Medina-Cantu didn’t have a Second Amendment right that could be infringed, noting that the Bruen ruling “did not unequivocally abrogate our precedent that the plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass illegal aliens.”
“Under Bruen’s standard, our precedent dictates that Medina-Cantu’s Second Amendment challenge fails at this first step,” the ruling stated. “We held in Portillo-Munoz that the Second Amendment’s plain text does not cover the conduct of aliens who are unlawfully present in the United States. Consistent with Bruen’s mandate, we reached our decision in Portillo-Munoz by interpreting the text of the Second Amendment—i.e., the meaning of the phrase ‘the people’—and we did not engage in the ‘means-end scrutiny’ practice that the Supreme Court prohibited in Bruen.”
The court next viewed the case through the June 2024 Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Rahimi and again determined nothing had changed from its earlier decision.
“To summarize, this court held in Portillo-Munoz that illegal aliens are not ‘members of the political community’ covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment,” the ruling concluded. “The majority opinions in Bruen and Rahimi did not address this issue, nor did they unequivocally abrogate our holding in Portillo-Munoz. Accordingly, following the rule of orderliness, we are bound to follow Portillo-Munoz and uphold the constitutionality of [the statute] under the Second Amendment.”
In a concurring opinion, Circuit Judge James Ho, a Donald Trump appointee, took the matter a little further.
“To begin with, no Supreme Court precedent compels the application of the Second Amendment to illegal aliens—and certainly not New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen or United States v. Rahimi,” Judge Ho wrote. “That should be the end of the matter. We should not extend rights to illegal aliens any further than what the law requires.”
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