Washington.- The Supreme Court sided with the federal government this Friday in a dispute over the information that immigration officials must provide to immigrants about their deportation hearings.
In a 5-4 decision, the majority upheld the current requirements, which can mean missing basic information about a deportation hearing.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote the majority opinion, joined by four other conservatives on the court.
He warned that the decision “does not mean that the government is free from its obligation” to notify immigrants of deportation hearings. Rather, he wrote, it prevents immigrants from challenging removal orders “in perpetuity based on arguments they could have raised at a hearing they chose to skip.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissenting vote, wrote that the majority had formally approved the government’s “abject failure” to comply with its duty to adequately notify migrants of deportation proceedings.
Notice of such hearings “has been a crucial aspect of federal immigration policy since at least the early 1950s,” added Justice Jackson, who was joined by the court’s two other liberal justices and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.
The issue before the court was narrow and technical – how to interpret the country’s notoriously dense and tangled immigration laws – but the legal dispute took place while an immigration crisis has made immigration a top political priority in the midst of the presidential campaign.
In the last three years, a record number of immigrants have been detained at the country’s southern border. In the fiscal year that ended in September, 2.4 million were captured.
Although the numbers have dropped in recent months, the issue has become a growing political liability for President Biden. This month, he issued an executive order to essentially block asylum at the southern border, a major change in the way the country has handled requests from people seeking protection in the United States.
The litigation before the court arose from a group of cases filed by immigrants who challenged their deportations, claiming they never received proper notice of their court hearings. Although the circumstances of each case varied, in all of them the government did not provide a single appearance notice with information about the time and location of the deportation hearing.
In each case, the migrant did not appear at the hearing and was ordered expelled. Each person challenged the deportation.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country, heard one of the cases and sided with the government. Judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, typically one of the most liberal appeals courts, sided with the immigrants in the other two cases.
This type of division between appellate courts is usually cause for review by the Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs challenging their deportation orders contend that for years, the Department of Homeland Security has used a flawed process to notify people of their hearings.
One of the petitioners, Moris Esmelis Campos-Chaves, had fled to the United States from El Salvador. Mr. Campos-Chaves forded the Rio Grande in January 2005 near Laredo, Texas.
He stated that he received an initial notice for a deportation hearing, but that it did not include a date or time. Later that year, the immigration court mailed a notice with details of his hearing to a Texas address he had provided to immigration officials. When he did not show up for the hearing, an immigration judge ordered his deportation.
In September 2018, he requested to reopen his case, arguing that he had never received the details of his hearing and that his children would face exceptional hardship if he were deported.
Mr. Campos-Chaves, who works as a landscaper, and his wife have two children, both born in the United States.
After the judge denied his request, he appealed. The Fifth Circuit sided with the lower court.
Mr. Campos-Chaves then requested the intervention of the Supreme Court. His case joins those of Varinder Singh, an Indian citizen who had crossed into the United States by climbing a fence on the Mexican border, and Raúl Daniel Méndez-Colín, a citizen of Mexico who crossed the Arizona border by car.
In oral arguments in January, the attorney representing the immigrants, Easha Anand, had argued that the government was “flouting the plain text” of federal immigration law by failing to notify people of their court dates. .
Government attorney Charles L. McCloud argued that a ruling in favor of the migrants would mean that “an avalanche” of cases could be dumped back into the immigration system and that such a ruling “threatens to destabilize hundreds of thousands” of orders. of deportation that the courts have issued for decades.
Justice Gorsuch had been skeptical of this opinion. He said current government regulations “suggest that many things are required in a notice to appear, except things the government considers inconvenient, such as the hearing date.” The government’s argument, he added, seemed to be based on “trust us.”
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