The battle over immigration enforcement in the United States has increasingly moved from streets, workplaces and detention centers into federal courtrooms. One of the most emotionally charged questions is whether a person who entered the country unlawfully has a constitutional right to move freely throughout the United States and, if so, how far that right limits the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The answer is much more complicated than the viral claim that undocumented immigrants simply “have no constitutional rights to travel.”

The Constitution does recognize a fundamental right of interstate travel, but Supreme Court doctrine has historically described important parts of that right in terms of citizenship. Congress’s Constitution Annotated explains that the doctrine includes the right of a citizen to move freely between states, along with protections for citizens temporarily visiting or becoming residents of another state. That does not mean, however, that noncitizens living in the United States are completely outside constitutional protection.

That distinction is crucial.

Immigration status gives the federal government broad authority to arrest, detain and remove people who are legally removable. But immigration agents do not receive unlimited power merely because someone lacks lawful status. Questions involving detention, searches, entry into homes, due process and access to courts continue to generate constitutional litigation.

In fact, recent federal court decisions show just how contested that authority remains.

One major example came from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in May 2026. The case involved two Mexican nationals, Fidencio Hernandez Alvarez and Ismael Cerro Perez, who had entered the United States without inspection and had lived in the country for years. Both were arrested by immigration authorities following traffic stops in Florida.

The Department of Homeland Security argued that because the men had never been formally admitted into the United States, federal law required them to remain detained without the possibility of bond while their immigration proceedings continued.

Federal judges disagreed.

The Eleventh Circuit held that the government was reading the immigration statute too broadly. The court concluded that the mandatory detention provision DHS relied upon did not automatically apply simply because an unadmitted immigrant was later found somewhere inside the United States. Instead, the court said the ordinary detention statute generally governed people in that situation, making them potentially eligible for bond hearings.

That decision is important because it illustrates the difference between two very different statements.

One is that the federal government possesses broad immigration-enforcement authority.

That is true.

The other is that undocumented immigrants have essentially no constitutional protections once inside the country.

That is not an accurate description of American law.

The broader political debate has become increasingly intense as ICE has expanded enforcement operations. Supporters of stronger immigration enforcement argue that federal officers should be able to locate and arrest people who are subject to removal without being blocked by endless litigation. They point out that immigration law would have little meaning if removal orders or unlawful-entry provisions could not actually be enforced.

From that perspective, ICE is carrying out laws enacted by Congress rather than creating immigration policy on its own.

Critics, however, argue that enforcement power must still have constitutional boundaries. Their lawsuits often do not claim that every undocumented immigrant has an unconditional right to remain in the United States. Instead, many challenges focus on how arrests occur, whether detention is lawful, whether people receive meaningful hearings and whether federal agents comply with constitutional protections during enforcement actions.

That distinction has repeatedly mattered in federal court.

The federal judiciary has also pushed back against the government in other immigration disputes. In April 2026, for example, the D.C. Circuit ruled against an administration policy that attempted to broadly shut down access to asylum at the border. The court concluded that the executive branch could not simply bypass procedures established by Congress.

Other cases have gone in the government’s favor.

That uneven pattern is precisely why sweeping statements about immigrants having “no constitutional rights” can be misleading.

Immigration law contains several legal categories that are often collapsed into the word “illegal.” Someone who crossed the border without inspection may be in a very different legal position from an asylum applicant, a person with Temporary Protected Status, someone released under an order of supervision, or a longtime resident currently fighting removal proceedings.

Even among undocumented immigrants, the government’s authority can depend on where the person was encountered, how long they have been present, whether removal proceedings have begun and what specific statute is being used to detain them.

The Eleventh Circuit’s 2026 decision illustrates this complexity particularly well.

DHS argued that all people who had never been lawfully admitted should be treated as “applicants for admission” and therefore subjected to mandatory detention. The appeals court rejected that interpretation, noting that for nearly three decades most immigrants arrested in the interior had been treated as potentially eligible for bond.

The court did not say that those individuals had a constitutional right to remain permanently in America.

It did not cancel immigration enforcement.

And it did not prevent ICE from arresting people who may be removable.

It addressed something narrower but extremely important: whether the government could automatically imprison them without access to the bond process available under another section of federal immigration law.

That is often how constitutional disputes actually work.

The legal question is rarely as simple as “Can ICE arrest this person?”

Instead, courts may ask: Did officers have lawful authority for the arrest? Which detention statute applies? Is a bond hearing required? Was a home entered legally? Can the person challenge detention through habeas corpus? Did Congress authorize the government’s particular procedure?

For supporters of aggressive enforcement, those judicial limits can feel like unnecessary obstacles preventing ICE from doing its job.

For civil-liberties advocates, those limits are exactly what courts are supposed to provide when the government exercises one of its most coercive powers: physically taking someone into custody.

There is also a broader constitutional principle involved.

The federal government unquestionably has stronger authority over noncitizens in immigration matters than it does over American citizens. Citizenship matters enormously in constitutional law, particularly when discussing rights such as interstate travel and the absolute right of a citizen to remain in the United States.

But “fewer protections” is not the same thing as “no protections.”

Federal courts continue to hear claims brought by immigrants challenging detention and government conduct, sometimes rejecting those challenges and sometimes ruling against immigration authorities. The current legal landscape therefore does not support the broad claim that a single federal court has now declared undocumented immigrants constitutionally rightless when traveling inside America.

What is happening instead is more significant—and more complicated.

Courts are drawing boundaries between two powerful principles.

On one side is the federal government’s constitutional authority to control immigration, detain certain noncitizens and remove people who have no legal right to remain.

On the other is the principle that government power is still limited by statutes, judicial review and constitutional safeguards.

That debate is unlikely to disappear.

As ICE enforcement expands, federal courts will continue being asked where immigration authority ends and individual constitutional protection begins.

And the next major ruling could reshape that boundary again.