Three judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said this week that illegal immigrants do not have rights under the Second Amendment.
They used United States v. Portillo-Munoz to support their case, which says that an illegal alien cannot have a gun or ammo.
Jose Paz Medina-Cantu fought this ban and was arrested on July 13, 2022, for “possession of a firearm and ammo as an illegal alien…and illegal return into the United States.”
According to Medina-Cantu, the gun charges should be dropped because of Bruen (2022), but the Fifth Circuit said that Bruen did not change the rule in Portillo-Munoz.
The three-judge panel said, “Portillo-Munoz is valid under the Second Amendment because the term ‘the people’ in the Second Amendment does not include aliens who are in the United States illegally.”
They also said that Rahimi (2024) did not get rid of Portillo-Munoz’s rule that illegal immigrants could not own guns.
Breitbart News showed an additional letter brief from July 31, 2024, in which the U.S. Government said that “illegal aliens” do not have rights under the Second Amendment.
A “directive to address the effect of the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Rahimi (2024)” led to the submission of the supplemental letter brief.
According to the extra letter brief sent by the DOJ on July 31, 2024, the U.S. Government says that the laws against “illegal aliens” and guns in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5)(A) are still legal.
“Nothing in Rahimi challenges this Court’s logic,” the U.S. Government said. In Rahimi, however, the Supreme Court underlined what it had already said in other cases: the Second Amendment applies to “ordinary people.”
