WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether longtime legal immigrants to the United States can be deported without legal recourse if they had committed a serious crime in the past.
A ruling on the issue is due by the summer and could affect several thousand pending cases.
In 1996, Congress, newly under Republican control, sought to crack down on immigrants--including those who were here legally--by restricting government benefits and making it easier to deport those who commit crimes.
Immigrants who committed aggravated felonies, such as drug dealing, had forfeited their right to live in the United States, congressional leaders said. Such criminals should not be allowed to tie up the courts with years of legal claims, they added.
The new law closed the courthouse door to those who wanted to challenge their forced removal from the United States. "Any final [Immigration and Naturalization Service] order of deportation against any alien who is deportable by reason of having committed a criminal offense . . . shall not be subject to review by any court," it said.
Immigrants' rights lawyers have been fighting this "court stripping" provision and have been winning in many parts of the nation. They also say that it is unfair to apply this harsh automatic deportation rule to people who pleaded guilty to crimes before the provision became law.
Before 1996, a longtime legal resident who was not a U.S. citizen could be deported for committing a crime. However, many such people obtained leniency if they could show the INS that, for example, they had a job and a family in the United States and had lived here productively for years.
But the 1996 law canceled the authority of the INS to grant these "waivers" of deportation for "criminal aliens."
Now the Supreme Court will consider whether these legal immigrants can even go to court to challenge the unfairness of applying the new law retroactively to them.
"This is a fundamental issue of whether the INS can act as judge, jury and executioner, so to speak, in an immigration case," said Lucas Guttentag, an attorney for the Immigrants Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.
He argued that the Constitution gives all people a right to go to court to ask a judge to hear their claims. Most lower courts have agreed, including the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California. Its judges said that all people can ask for a judge's help by filing a writ of habeas corpus.
