Federal Appeals Court Upholds Federal Law Banning Guns For Illegal Aliens
Illegal aliens don’t have Second Amendment rights: ““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.”
An appeals court has upheld a federal law banning illegal aliens from possessing guns, rejecting a constitutional challenge brought by a Mexican migrant who entered the country unlawfully.
The migrant, Jose Paz Medina-Cantu, was a repeat offender: He had previously been deported and removed when he was arrested by Texas boarder patrol agents in 2022. The government charged him with two separate counts, possession of a firearm as an illegal alien and illegal reentry into the United States. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 months in prison, but preserved his right to appeal the first count on the grounds that the Second Amendment protected his right to keep and bear arms.
Medina-Cantu had earlier asked a district court to dismiss the first charge. He claimed that the gun restriction on illegal aliens violated the Second Amendment in light of US Supreme Court’s recent ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, where the Court required gun laws to be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The government couldn’t meet that burden, he argued, because banning illegal aliens from having guns was a tradition that did not exist when the Second Amendment was adopted.
The district court disagreed, finding sufficient historical context for the federal gun ban. Medina-Cantu then appealed.
Earlier this week, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s ruling. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen and in a later case “did not unequivocally abrogate our precedent that the plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass illegal aliens,” it held.
In other words, someone who is here illegally can’t claim the protection of the law of the land that excludes him from that protection.
You would think that’s just common sense.
And for common sense, we can thank Judge James Ho, who gets straight to the point in his concurrence:
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.
…
[A]n 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.
…
And … 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 of course, as Judge Ho points out, that’s “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.”
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Comments
Hard to disagree with this decision. There might also be some historical basis on trying to prohibit unauthorized individuals that cross borders from carrying arms. Now, where have I ever heard of historical counts of such things?
They were criminals then just as they are criminals. The fact that they may not have been regularly prosecuted in the past does not make their conduct now legal any more than speeding yesterday without getting a ticket makes it legal for you to speed today.
Legal guns are for legal people.
Good. Now do voting.
You cannot win them all!
They got free healthcare, housing down payment, ability to vote and free college education already.
4 out of 5 is pretty good – if you are an illegal.
There’s a meme going around that says,
“If you’re better off than you were four years ago, you’re probably an illegal alien.”
Interesting. Does that then make references to ‘person’ (singular) elsewhere in the Constitution dependent upon them being part of ‘the people’ as defined here as Citizens, resident aliens (green card holders) and holders of a valid immigration Visa, IOW not illegally/unlawfully present in the USA? Seems like a logical extension. If so that’s a big change. If not why?
No, it doesn’t. Illegal aliens are obviously people, and thus generally have all of the rights guaranteed by the constitution. The argument here is that while they are people, they are not part of “the people”, which obviously means “the people of the united states”. It’s only those people’s right to keep and bear arms that may not be abridged, while it’s just fine to abridge other people’s RKBA.
(Note that they still have a RKBA; that all human beings have by virtue of being human. But Congress is not prohibited from abridging that right, just as it’s not prohibited from infringing on the freedom of speech of foreigners in foreign countries.)
Yes, we should deny guns to the foreign Invaders
Form 4473 has the illegal alien question that will dis-qualify a gun purchase. Brake the law and expect to have a gun? A big NOPE.
But the issue here is whether that question is constitutional.
The real question is whether form 4473 is really legal. After all the Constitution trumps federal statute
It was a mistake to bypass Judge Ho for SCOTUS.
I’m sure the folks in that Colorado apartment complex are taking great comfort in this.
Beat me to it
This will def stop the gang in their tracks.
It’s only common sense that illegal aliens should have illegal guns.
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