By Josh Gerstein
Politico
June 25, 2020
Just a week after granting a reprieve
to the so-called Dreamers, the Supreme Court dealt a major defeat to
immigrant rights advocates on Thursday by upholding a fast-track
deportation process that the Trump administration is seeking to expand.
The procedure, called "expedited
removal," forces allegedly undocumented immigrants out of the country
with little or no review by the judicial branch.
In a 7-2 decision,
the justices held that the Constitution’s clause barring suspension of
habeas corpus rights in peacetime does not preclude Congress from
sharply limiting the rights of some foreigners to challenge their
deportation in the federal courts.
While the ruling is a victory for the
President Donald Trump and his high-profile effort to crack down on
illegal immigration, the legislation the justices upheld Thursday, which
limits federal court involvement in expedited removal cases, was
actually signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996.
The case the justices decided Thursday
involved a Sri Lankan man, Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, picked up by the
Border Patrol about 25 yards from the Mexican border in 2017.
Thuraissigiam maintains that he could be persecuted in Sri Lanka because
of his Tamil heritage and political views, but it’s unclear whether he
relayed those concerns clearly during the initial immigration
proceedings. His lawyers say the translation was poor and he did not
understand the questions being asked.
Justice Samuel Alito’s majority
opinion, which was joined by all the court’s Republican appointees, said
Congress has the right to create an expedited immigration process in
cases involving individuals like Thuraissigiam who have weak ties to the
U.S. at the time of their detention. Alito also held the ancient writ
of habeas corpus has no application to an immigrant who is not really
seeking release, but legal status in the U.S.
“Simply releasing him would not
provide the right to stay in the country that his petition ultimately
seeks. Without a change in status, he would remain subject to arrest,
detention, and removal,” Alito wrote. “The Government is happy to
release him — provided the release occurs in the cabin of a plane bound
for Sri Lanka …The relief requested falls outside the scope of the writ
as it was understood when the Constitution was adopted.”
Alito also said allowing further
judicial challenge threatened to bog down an asylum system that is
already overwhelmed with a huge surge of cases.
“The past decade has seen a 1,883%
increase in credible-fear claims,” wrote Alito, an appointee of
President George W. Bush. “If courts must review credible-fear claims
that in the eyes of immigration officials and an immigration judge do
not meet the low bar for such claims, expedited removal would augment
the burdens on that system.”
The two dissenters were Democratic
appointees: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. They said the
majority decision abdicated the court’s responsibility to interpret the
law and to protect individuals from arbitrary power.
“Today’s decision handcuffs the
Judiciary’s ability to perform its constitutional duty to safeguard
individual liberty and dismantles a critical component of the separation
of powers,” Sotomayor wrote, joined by Kagan. “It will leave
significant exercises of executive discretion unchecked in the very
circumstance where the writ’s protections ‘have been strongest,’ And it
increases the risk of erroneous immigration decisions that contravene
governing statutes and treaties.”
Sotomayor also faulted Alito for
suggesting constitutional principles should be interpreted with an eye
to governmental efficiency.
“The Court appears to justify its
decision by adverting to the burdens of affording robust judicial review
of asylum decisions. But our constitutional protections should not
hinge on the vicissitudes of the political climate or bend to
accommodate burdens on the Judiciary,” she wrote.
The high court’s two other Democratic
appointees, Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sided with
the majority but took a more fact-specific approach, limited to
circumstances closely resembling the case before the court. They agreed
Thuraissigiam could be thrown out of the country without further legal
process.
However, Breyer and Ginsburg stressed
that their views could well be different if the immigrant facing
deportation had been in the U.S. longer or was captured far from the
border. “Addressing more broadly whether the Suspension Clause protects
people challenging removal decisions may raise a host of difficult
questions,” Breyer wrote, joined by Ginsburg.
Breyer wrote that he would not use the
current case to make sweeping conclusions about the availability of
habeas corpus to immigrants or the rights of foreign citizens under
specific circumstances.
The Justice Department praised the ruling.
“The Supreme Court’s decision today in
DHS v. Thuraissigiam is an important victory for enforcement of the
immigration laws,” a department spokesperson said in a statement. “The
decision upholds the constitutionality of expedited removal — a critical
tool provided by Congress over twenty years ago on a bipartisan basis
to help secure our borders and ensure the efficient removal of aliens
who illegally cross our borders —and reaffirms the proper scope of
habeas relief in the immigration context. Today’s decision allows the
Trump Administration to continue to defend our borders, uphold the rule
of law, and keep Americans safe.“
The high court ruling blessing
expedited removal proceedings comes as the Trump administration is
moving to broaden the use of that fast-track process. In recent years,
it was used within 100 miles of the southern border and for individuals
who allegedly entered illegally within the past two weeks.
The Trump administration moved last
year to allow authorities to invoke the sped-up process for deportation
proceedings against immigrants anywhere in the country alleged to have
entered the country anytime in the previous two years. A judge in
Washington blocked that expansion last September, but on Tuesday a
federal appeals court panel unanimously voted to lift that injunction, effectively greenlighting more widespread use of the fast-track deportation procedure.
1 comment:
Promises made. Promises kept.
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