Sagastizado Sanchez v. Noem: Due Process and the Unreviewed “Reasonable Fear” Interview Before Third-Country Removal
- Citation
- Sagastizado Sanchez v. Noem, No. 5:25-cv-00104 (S.D. Tex. Oct. 2, 2025)
- Court
- U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Laredo Division
- Decided
- October 2, 2025 (preliminary injunction; earlier order Sept. 10, 2025)
- Judge
- Diana Saldaña
- Statute
- 28 U.S.C. § 2241; 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3) (withholding of removal); Convention Against Torture; Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause
- Holding
- A noncitizen is likely to succeed on the claim that removing him to a third country following a negative reasonable-fear interview, without independent immigration-judge review of that determination, violates procedural due process. Removal enjoined pending such review.
The third-country removal docket has a recurring shape. A noncitizen who has already won protection against return to his own country is told he will instead be sent somewhere else — a country that has agreed to receive him — on the strength of a screening interview the government insists no judge may review. Sagastizado Sanchez v. Noem is one of the cleaner illustrations of why that posture raises a serious due-process problem.
The facts
Sagastizado, a Salvadoran national, had been granted withholding of removal as to El Salvador in 2024 — a determination that he faced a clear probability of persecution there. Detained at an ICE check-in in 2025, he was notified that he would be removed to Mexico, which had agreed to accept him. An asylum officer conducted a “reasonable fear” interview directed at Mexico and reached a negative result, and the government took the position that the result was not subject to review by an immigration judge. Sagastizado petitioned under § 2241.
The Mathews analysis
Applying the familiar balancing test of Mathews v. Eldridge, the court concluded that he was likely to succeed on the merits. The private interest — avoiding removal to a country where he claimed to fear harm — is among the weightiest the law recognizes; the risk of error in an unreviewed, single-officer screening is substantial; and the government’s own regulatory scheme already provides for immigration-judge review of negative fear determinations in the analogous reinstatement and expedited-removal contexts. The court observed that there is no regulation authorizing fear-based screening interviews without providing for independent review. It enjoined removal from the continental United States until an immigration judge reviewed the negative determination, and then only if the judge affirmed it.
“Where the consequence of error is removal to a feared country, the Constitution does not tolerate a screening from which there is no appeal.”
Part of a pattern
The decision leaned on the Ninth Circuit’s published ruling in Ibarra-Perez v. United States, which held that § 1252’s jurisdiction-stripping provisions do not bar a federal court from hearing a due-process challenge to a post-order, third-country removal decision — a decision made after proceedings before the immigration judge and Board have ended. A companion ruling out of the District of Maryland reached the same conclusion. Together with this archive’s coverage of the Massachusetts class litigation and the South Sudan flights, Sagastizado shows district courts converging on a single proposition: the new third-country architecture cannot dispense with the screening review the regulations otherwise guarantee.
Filed under Third-Country Removal. Published October 2, 2025.