Supreme Court makes it harder to deport legal immigrants who commit crimes
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Updated: 11:50 a.m. on Tuesday, April 17, 2018
The Supreme Court on Tuesday erected new bars to deporting legal immigrants for crimes they’ve committed here in the U.S., saying the part of law that set the level of criminal behavior deserving removal is too vague.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, in one of his first major breaks with fellow conservatives, joined the court’s left-leaning four justices in upending that part of immigration law.
He and the liberal bloc said that if Congress wants to make legal immigrants deportable for lower-level felonies they can write those offenses into the law — but they can’t use a “vague” catch-all definition to cover any serious crimes they didn’t list.
“It was too hard to tell what would qualify as a violent felony,” Justice Elena Kagan said from the bench as she announced the decision.
It’s not clear how widespread the effects of the ruling would be on deportations. Most of those focus on ousting illegal immigrants who never had permission to be in the U.S., while Tuesday’s case deals with legal permanent residents who committed crimes while here, and whether those are serious enough to deserve automatic deportation.
Justice Kagan, writing the controlling opinion, said she expects the government to use other parts of the law to try to deport many of those same people. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing the main dissent, said the effects could be “significant.”
Not only did the government say this section of law is “critical” for deporting “dangerous criminal aliens,” but other parts of the criminal code use the same language — such as deciding who’s banned from possessing a firearm. If the law is too vague in the immigration context, it could also be too vague in the gun context, Chief Justice Roberts suggested.
Justice Clarence Thomas went even further, saying the court was treading on dangerous ground by scouring the law books for badly written laws.
“I continue to doubt that our practice of striking down statutes as unconstitutionally vague is consistent with the original meaning of the Due Process Clause,” he wrote.
Justice Gorsuch said Congress could easily repair the situation by writing a new law detailing all the offenses it thought rise to the level of deportation-worthy for legal immigrants.
“Congress might, for example, say that a conviction for any felony carrying a prison sentence of a specified length opens an alien to removal. Congress has done almost exactly this in other laws,” he wrote.
• Alex Swoyer contributed to this story.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/17/scotus-harder-deport-immigrants-commit-crimes/?
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