Opinion analysis

Supreme Court Monday Unanimous rule Against a non-U.S. citizen who is defending his prosecution for the crime of re-entering the country.

case, United States v. Palomar-San Diego, Involving a Mexican citizen, Refugio Palomar-Santiago, who became a legal permanent resident (ie, green card holder) in 1990. Eight years later, an immigration judge discovered that he was convicted of a felony for being affected in California. Federal immigration law. Palomar-Santiago gave up the right to appeal and was soon deported.But six years after being deported, the Supreme Court ruled Leocal v. Ashcroft According to relevant federal regulations, DUI convictions such as Palomar-Santiago do not aggravate felonies. As Judge Sonia Sotomayor admitted, “Therefore, Paloma Santiago’s severance order should never be issued.”

In 2018, Palomar-Santiago was found living in the United States. He was prosecuted for illegally re-entering the country after being deported. Palomar-Santiago tried to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that his original deportation order was based on Leocal. Federal regulations criminalize re-entry and require the defendant to want to carry out a collateral attack on his accompanying deportation order to prove that three conditions have been met: (1) He has exhausted all administrative remedies that he may have obtained; (2) He was deprived of “the opportunity for judicial review”; (3) The deportation order is fundamentally unfair. Since the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that defendants like Palomar-Santiago who have no legal basis do not have to meet the first two conditions, the District Court rejected the indictment and the Ninth Circuit Court confirmed it.

But the Supreme Court disagreed with this statement in Sotomayor’s eight-page opinion. The court made its ruling a statutory text and considered all three conditions to be mandatory. When talking about Palomar-Santiago’s claims, Sotomayor explained that the requirements for administrative exhaustion and judicial deprivation review were “not met, simply because the non-citizen was removed from office because he was not actually removed from office because of a crime. Regarding the provisions of the Ninth Circuit, Sotomayor wrote: “When Congress uses’mandatory language’ in the administrative exhaustion provisions,’the court may not justify exhaustion.’

The court briefly introduced some of Paloma Santiago’s arguments. First, Palomar-Santiago urges the court to rule that when an immigration judge incorrectly informs a non-citizen that a previous conviction constitutes a reversible crime, the administrative review of the deportation order should not be considered “available,” especially It takes into account the complexity of immigration laws. The court rejected the principle that the substantial complexity of legal arguments can determine whether administrative remedies are available. Second, Palomar-Santiago argued that when the non-citizen’s incidental question is based on the substantive invalidity of the order rather than a procedural defect, the statutory requirement should not apply. However, based on the original meaning of both “challenge” and “collateral attack”, although Paloma Santiago believed that the order was invalid at the time, the court did not persuade the substantively defective deportation order to not be “challenged” constraint. Entrance. In the end, the court insisted that the clarity of the statutory plan left no room for the application of the constitutional circumvention regulations. Paloma Santiago had asked the court to adopt the constitutional circumvention regulations to benefit the constitutional circumvention.

The direct meaning of the court ruling may be very narrow. The decision overturned the precedent of the ninth circuit court’s collateral inquiries regarding reconvicts. By 2020, nearly a quarter of all re-entry prosecutions will be filed in the Ninth Circuit, accounting for a significant portion of the approximately 15,000 such cases, but by no means a majority. The opinion is brief, focusing on the text of the statute, without involving constitutional considerations. In fact, with regard to Palomar-Santiago’s constitutional arguments that allow “the outcome of administrative procedures to ultimately determine the outcome of criminal offences,” the court asserted that these arguments “do not fall within the scope of the narrow-sense question granted to narrow-sense terms.”

On the other hand, the decision may have wider potential consequences for non-citizens. The Federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement pursued the deportation order based on a criminal conviction, but later found that it contradicted the court’s interpretation of the law.For example, the Supreme Court has repeatedly found certain crimes to be felonies, such as one-time drug use (in Lopez v Gonzalez), second possession of drugs (in Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder), owning marijuana and intentionally spreading it (in Moncrieffe v. Holder) And legal rape (in Esquivel-Quintana v. Session)—Does not constitute a serious felony. According to Monday’s ruling, federal prosecutors are more likely to file criminal re-entry charges against non-citizens who have been illegally deported and increase penalties.