A federal appeals court in New Orleans has ruled that illegal immigrants do not have the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.
The court’s decision rejected arguments from a Mexican man who was convicted of unlawfully possessing a handgun and claimed that the ban was unconstitutional.
A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that federal prohibitions on illegal immigrants owning firearms was lawful, and Second Amendment rights do not apply to those who have entered the country illegally.
The ruling followed an appeal by Jose Paz Medina-Cantu, who was arrested by Border Patrol agents in Texas in 2022. He faced charges for illegally possessing a handgun and for re-entering the country unlawfully after a prior deportation.
Medina-Cantu pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 months in prison last year. However, he reserved the right to challenge on appeal the gun charge, arguing that it infringed on his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
His lawyers based their argument on the 2022 landmark New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision by the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority that established a new standard to determine whether a law violates the Second Amendment.
The Bruen ruling required gun regulations to be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” and the three-judge panel said the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on gun rights “did not unequivocally abrogate our precedent that the plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass illegal aliens.”
Since the Bruen decision, numerous federal and state gun control measures have faced legal challenges with varied outcomes. Many of these laws have been struck down as unconstitutional.
Medina-Cantu’s attorneys argued that the ruling also undermined a 2011 decision by the 5th Circuit in United States v. Portillo-Munoz. That earlier ruling had upheld the immigration-related gun ban, noting that there was no historical precedent from around the time the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791 for disarming individuals solely based on their immigration status.
The three-judge panel said Portillo-Munoz “remains good law” and that the rights of U.S. citizens do not apply to illegal migrants.
“The Second Amendment protects the right of ‘the people’ to keep and bear arms. Our court has held that the term ‘the people’ under the Second Amendment does not include illegal aliens,” U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho, a conservative appointee of Republican President Trump, wrote in a concurring opinion.
“As to common sense, an illegal alien does not become ‘part of a national community’ by unlawfully entering it, any more than a thief becomes an owner of property by stealing it.”
“The Court has repeatedly explained that ‘an alien… does not become one of the people to whom these things are secured by our Constitution by an attempt to enter forbidden by law’… But that’s, of course, the very definition of an illegal alien – one who ‘attempts to enter’ our country in a manner ‘forbidden by law.’”
“So illegal aliens are not part of ‘the people’ entitled to the protections of the Second Amendment’.
Ho added that for an illegal alien to appeal to the Constitution is to concede that the United States is governed by that supreme law.
“And ‘the power to exclude [aliens from the United States] has been determined to exist’ under our Constitution. So, the Court concluded, ‘those who are excluded cannot assert the rights in general obtaining in a land to which they do not belong as citizens or otherwise,’” Ho wrote.
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