WASHINGTON — Illegal immigrants who return to the United States after being deported are "continuous lawbreakers" and are subject to automatic removal from this country, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, even if they have lived here more than 20 years and have jobs and families.
The 8-1 decision upholds a strict 1996 law that adopted a no-leniency policy for those who returned illegally to this country after having been deported.
"This is a 'two strikes and you're out' law," said Washington lawyer David Gossett, who challenged its application to illegal immigrants who reentered the country before 1996, when Congress toughened the law. He estimated that Thursday's ruling would apply to "tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands" of immigrants who reentered the country illegally in recent decades.
His client, Humberto Fernandez-Vargas, is a 53-year-old citizen of Mexico who, starting in the 1970s, entered the United States illegally -- and was subsequently deported -- several times.
In 1982, he returned for the last time and settled quietly in Utah. He started a trucking business, fathered a son in 1989 and married the boy's mother in 2001.
Based on his marriage to a U.S. citizen, he applied for lawful permanent residence in the United States. That filing backfired, since it tipped off immigration authorities that he was here illegally. He was taken into custody and deported to Juarez, Mexico, two years ago. His wife, Rita, has continued the legal battle on his behalf.
The Supreme Court took up the case because several lower courts -- including the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction in California and eight other Western states -- had adopted a lenient standard for illegal immigrants who had been in the United States for decades. The 9th Circuit judges had ruled that Congress did not mean to apply the new law to illegal immigrants who had reentered the country before 1996.
But writing for the majority on the Supreme Court, Justice David H. Souter disagreed, saying that Congress meant the law to apply to every once-deported immigrant who had returned illegally and stayed.
Fernandez-Vargas "had an ample warning" of the strict new law in 1996, and "he chose to remain after the new statute became effective," Souter wrote in Fernandez-Vargas vs. Gonzales. "He claims a right to continue illegal conduct indefinitely under the terms on which it began, an entitlement of legal stasis for those whose lawbreaking is continuous."
