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.
Was being cynical. I was more poking at the fact that unauthorized, armed individuals coming across a border is something for which there is centuries of experience. The historical experience is to treat them as a threat, and to disarm, if not kill them.
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.)
Yeah that’s the mainstream viewpoint and it isn’t a crazy take. What it doesn’t do is explain why ‘person’ isn’t an equivalent qualifier that also narrows the application of the right. This seems important b/c other rights have no qualifier that would limit the application to a more narrow group; the 6th amendment applies to ‘the accused’ not just ‘the people’ or ‘person’. IMO when we accept that ‘the people’ (a distinct group) is a deliberate narrowing of the application we must then view ‘person’ as a singular member of the group ‘the people’. Obviously most folks disagree with this interpretation.
Because “person” means “human being”; all human beings are people, and if the amendment had said that Congress couldn’t violate people’s rights then that would include everyone.
But “the people” doesn’t mean all people; it means a specific set of people, a nation. In this case it obviously means what we would call “Americans”. So the court seems to be saying that although all people have the same rights, Congress is only barred from violating certain people’s rights.
The problem with that is that there’s no way for the court not to apply the same reasoning to the fourth amendment, and to the second half of the first amendment. So tourists and illegal aliens could be subject to unreasonable searches, seizures, and any other violations of their right to privacy, and while their freedom of speech and of the press would still be protected, their rights to assemble or to petition the government would not be.
And all this must be considered in light of the fact that the fourteenth amendment explicitly protects any person, which clearly includes illegal aliens. So just going on the text, states can’t violate illegal aliens’ rights to be armed, to privacy, to assemble, and to petition, but Congress can. Which I don’t think is consistent with how the fourteenth seems to be interpreted as applying to Congress as well.
So felons can now carry weapons, as “people” of course?
Non-dangerous felons, yes, they have the same constitutional right as anyone else. The law disarming all felons is unconstitutional. To constitutionally disarm someone there must be a judicial finding that they are dangerous, e.g. that they’ve committed a violent crime.
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
That’s what I said. The statute clearly authorizes the question, but the issue is whether that statute is constitutional. If it isn’t then it’s invalid, and therefore giving a false answer to it is not a crime.
I’m not sure what you mean. 4473 was not created by any statute. It was implemented by the ATF much like arbitrary rule changes in response to the Gun Control Act of 1968. The Act denied prohibited people from owning firearms and the ATF created the 4473 in response. It was not mandated by statute.
The Act prohibits certain people from owning arms, and authorizes the ATF to enforce that prohibition. Therefore the ATF is authorized to create a form, so it can know who is allowed to own arms and who isn’t.
Provided that the Act is constitutional. If it isn’t, then all enforcement of it is invalid, including the form. And if the Act in general is constitutional but one provision is not, then the form is valid but the question designed to enforce that provision is not, and giving a false answer to that question is not perjury.
Like Jack Smith as “special counsel.”
There are millions of people who can’t “legally” purchase a firearm in the U.S. but can legally possess a firearm without question.
Huh? I don’t understand what you mean by that.
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.
There ain’t nothing going on there. The Gov of Colorado says so
And now with added Target parking lots!!
It’s only common sense that illegal aliens should have illegal guns.
I always hated the old NRA slogan that when guns were outlawed, only outlaws would have guns. It was too easy to interpret as a tautology: if guns were illegal, then owning one made YOU an outlaw.
yeah right
try stopping the criminals from getting weapons
hunter proved that
“[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.”
A better analogy would have been:: an illegal doesn’t become one of “the people”!by unlawfully invading the country any more than a squatter becomes a homeowner by occupying one. Except that I’m sure a bunch of lawyers would immediately pounce on me to explain that in their state, that is exactly what squatter law allows. I guess the Supremes didn’t want to point out the hypocrisy.
“[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.”
———
A basic, obvious and rational premise that is opposed by the vile Dhimmi-crats, who are supporters and enablers of illegal aliens, thieves/criminals and Islamofascists/Muslim supremacists/terrorists.
Except that a thief can eventually gain ownership of the property he stole, by adverse possession.
I see a whole new cottage industry….
Bless Judge James Ho’s parents!
Now if only we could ban illegal aliens.
Wouldn’t it be even better if they banned ILLEGAL ENTRY into our country in the first place.
Um, they did. That’s what makes it illegal. For the first century or so of the USA’s existence there was no such thing as illegal entry, because there was no law against any kind of entry.
(And if you take a strictly originalist view, nothing in the constitution authorizes Congress to regulate immigration, which is a huge problem.)
So the very fact that we’re discussing illegal entrants means there is a law that they have violated. That doesn’t change their rights once they’re here. The fourteenth amendment couldn’t be clearer that it protects everyone equally, regardless of how many laws they may have broken. So does the fifth.
So the question in this case was whether Congress may infringe their RKBA, and the court decided that it may.