Illegal immigrants do not have Second Amendment rights: appeals court

The court ruled on a case involving Jose Paz Medina-Cantu, a Mexican national who was detained in Texas by the US Customs and Border Patrol in 2022. Medina-Cantu had reentered the US after having already been deported and was charged with illegal possession of a handgun.

After he pleaded guilty to charges of illegally possessing a firearm and illegally re-entering the US, Medina-Cantu pursued a challenge to the firearms charge, with his lawyers arguing that he had a right under the Second Amendment to possess a gun, Fox News reported. The attorneys cited the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which the court ruled 6-3 that gun regulations must be "consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."

However, the three judges on the federal court panel decided that the illegal immigrant’s challenge to his conviction was based on the false premise that he had Second Amendment rights, which the court ruled do not apply to people who are in the US illegally. They wrote that the Supreme Court ruling "did not unequivocally abrogate our precedent that the plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass illegal aliens."

US Circuit Judge James Ho, a conservative circuit court judge appointed by former President Donald Trump, described succinctly why he ruled against Medina-Cantu, writing, “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.”

He added, "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."