The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that illegal aliens detained by ICE have no constitutional right to a bond hearing. The decision came down last week and it closes off one of the favorite tools immigration lawyers were using to spring their clients back onto the street. MSN has the story.

For folks who didn't spend 26 years listening to detention fights, a bond hearing worked like this. An illegal alien gets picked up, his lawyer runs to a judge and argues he should be released on bond pending his immigration case. Pay a sum, walk out the door, disappear into the interior, and maybe show up for the hearing years down the road. Sometimes. Usually not. The 5th Circuit just said that game is over for people who entered the country illegally.

The court's reasoning tracks with what the Supreme Court has said before: immigration detention is civil, it's part of the removal process, and the Constitution doesn't require a judge to hold a bail hearing for someone who crossed the border without permission. Detention is there to make sure the person actually gets removed. A bond system that releases people who then skip town defeats the purpose of detention in the first place.

The 5th Circuit covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. If you know anything about the illegal alien population in those states, you know this ruling has teeth. Texas alone has been carrying a massive enforcement load for years. This gives ICE and the immigration courts there room to hold people until their cases are resolved, which is the way the system was supposed to work all along.

The open-borders crowd is already calling this indefinite detention, which is their phrase for holding someone until the government can finish the paperwork and put him on a plane. I remember when they called expedited removal a human rights violation too. Expedited removal just means a fast-track process for people caught near the border with no valid claim, and it's been on the books for decades. The vocabulary never changes. Neither do the results they predict, and neither do the results they get.

In practice, illegal aliens picked up in the 5th Circuit after unlawful entry stay in custody while their removal proceedings run. No more shopping for a sympathetic judge to grant bond to somebody with three prior removal orders. No more catch-and-release with a court date written on a slip of paper. Removal works when the person is actually present for it. Every bond hearing that ends with a release is a deportation that probably doesn't happen.

Expect the other circuits to weigh in eventually, and expect this to end up at the Supreme Court if the circuits split. That's the usual route. But for now, in three states doing some of the heaviest enforcement lifting in the country, detention means detention.

I kept a notebook my whole career, and I can tell you the number of cases I saw fall apart because somebody got bonded out and vanished. It was a lot. The count only counts when the alien is still in the room.

Scoreboard: 5th Circuit says no bond hearings for illegal entrants. Detention holds. Removal proceeds. Another good day for the count.