A U.S. federal appeals court upheld a federal law that prohibits migrants in the United States illegally from possessing firearms.

A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Second Amendment rights do not apply to those who have illegally entered the country.

Per Fox News:

The ruling came in an appeal by Jose Paz Medina-Cantu, who had been arrested by Border Patrol agents in Texas in 2022 and charged with illegally possessing a handgun and unlawfully re-entering the country after being previously deported.

Medina-Cantu pleaded guilty and was sentenced last year to 15 months in prison, but he preserved the right to argue on appeal that the gun charge violated his right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.

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.

“We should not extend rights to illegal aliens any further than what the law requires,” U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho wrote, according to Reuters.

Reuters reports:

Medina-Cantu’s lawyers argued the ruling likewise undermined a 2011 decision by the 5th Circuit upholding the immigration-related ban as there was no historical tradition dating back to around when the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791 of disarming people based solely on their immigration status.

But 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.”

 

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