The full Fifth Circuit ruled that the due process clause does not protect the Jackson residents' asserted rights to clean water or to correct information from government officials. Writing for the court, Judge Kurt Engelhardt concluded there is no tradition in constitutional law that places those interests within due process. "The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing," he wrote.
Engelhardt added that, even assuming a due process violation, the city officials would be shielded by qualified immunity because no clearly established right was infringed. He also pointed residents to other avenues: file tort claims, vote in leaders who will manage the system better, or press their representatives for solutions.
Residents alleged city officials knowingly let lead contaminate Jackson's drinking water, injuring people who consumed it. The city has rejected those claims. Counsel for the resident, as well as spokespeople for the city of Jackson, did not respond right away to requests for comment. In 2025, a divided three-judge panel revived the residents' claim based on an asserted right to bodily autonomy, but that ruling disappeared when the full court agreed to rehear the case.
Engelhardt - appointed by Donald Trump - wrote that the residents' bodily integrity theory fits scenarios like a police officer committing sexual assault or forcing medication on prisoners, and that running a water system poorly is "wholly different." He noted that while the Supreme Court has tied some due process protections to a common-law informed-consent principle, those decisions do not create a constitutional guarantee of accurate information from public officials.
Judge Catharina Haynes, appointed by George W. Bush, concurred in part and dissented in part with four colleagues. She emphasized that, at this early stage, courts must accept the complaint's facts as true and allow discovery. "At bottom, the well-pleaded factual allegations in Plaintiffs' complaint, which we must accept as true, mirror in various ways one of the worst public health crises in recent American history - the Flint water crisis," she wrote.
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Haynes also said the plaintiffs pleaded a state-created danger theory that the majority overlooked, arguing the Fifth Circuit "stands practically alone in its decades-long fence-sitting, declining to either adopt or definitively rule out the state-created danger doctrine." She would adopt the doctrine and find a plausible bodily integrity claim. Parents who lost children during the prior year's fatal flooding at Texas's Camp Mystic likewise urged the court to recognize state-created danger, which would open the door to claims against public entities and officials accused of increasing residents' exposure to harm.
Federal constitutional claims tied to municipal breakdowns are now an even steeper climb in the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The court signaled that remedies will likely run through state-law tort suits and local politics rather than federal due process. If you live in a city facing infrastructure issues, that means outcomes will hinge on insurance, litigation under state law, and public investment decisions that can ripple into water rates, taxes, and property values where you live.
