United States Court of Appeals FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT Argued January 15, 2019 Decided June 21, 2019 No. 18-5148 KHALID AHMED QASSIM, APPELLANT v. DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL., APPELLEES Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (No. 1:04-cv-01194) Thomas B. Wilner argued the cause for appellant. With him on the briefs were Neil H. Koslowe, Kimberly Ferguson, and Anthony G. Amsterdam. Joseph Margulies was on the brief for amicus curiae Commonwealth Lawyers Association in support of appellant. Brad Hinshelwood, Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, argued the cause for appellees. With him on the brief were Sharon Swingle and Michael Shih. Before: MILLETT and PILLARD, Circuit Judges, and EDWARDS, Senior Circuit Judge. 2 Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge MILLETT. MILLETT, Circuit Judge: Khalid Ahmed Qassim, who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba for seventeen years, appeals the district court’s denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. On appeal, Qassim presses a due process challenge to the government’s use of undisclosed classified information as a basis for his detention. In denying Qassim’s motion in limine concerning the use of undisclosed information, the district court ruled that, as an alien Guantanamo detainee, Qassim has no rights under the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. In so ruling, the district court relied on this court’s 2009 decision in Kiyemba v. Obama, 555 F.3d 1022 (D.C. Cir. 2009), vacated, 559 U.S. 131, and judgment reinstated as amended, 605 F.3d 1046 (D.C. Cir. 2010). The district court’s ruling that binding circuit precedent denies Qassim all rights to due process was in error. Kiyemba did not so hold. That decision ruled only that the Due Process Clause does not invest detainees who have already been granted habeas corpus with a substantive due process right to be released into the United States. That decision did not decide, or have any occasion to address, what constitutional procedural protections apply to the litigation of a detainee’s habeas corpus petition in the first instance. Nor has any other decision of this circuit adopted a categorical prohibition on affording detainees seeking habeas relief any constitutional procedural protections. The governing law, in fact, is that Qassim and other alien detainees must be afforded a habeas process that ensures “meaningful review” of their detention. Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723, 783 (2008). Beyond that, resolution of Qassim’s specific due process challenge to the government’s withholding of classified 3 information would be premature precisely because the parties and the district court operated under a faulty understanding of circuit precedent. We instead are constrained to remand the case for further proceedings to be conducted within the correct legal framework and to develop the needed factual record. Pullman-Standard v. Swint, 456 U.S. 273, 291 (1982) (“When an appellate court discerns that a district court has failed to make a finding because of an erroneous view of the law, the usual rule is that there ...
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