Supreme Court Sides With Trump Administration In Asylum Cases
August 13, 2020
Martin Walsh
The U.S. Supreme Court has given the Trump administration another gigantic immigration victory.
On Thursday, the nation’s highest court ruled 7-2 that the federal government can deport illegal aliens, including those seeking asylum, quickly and with only limited judicial review.
The ruling could affect thousands of would-be immigrants now present in the United States.
Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sided with the Trump administration on the case.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elana Kagan, both liberals, were the two dissenters.
“In a decision in the case of Dept. of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, the court ruled that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) – which prevents judicial review of the credible fear determination – does not violate the Constitution’s Suspension Clause, which protects habeas corpus privileges that allow courts to determine if a person should be released due to unlawful detention,” Fox News reported.
“In 1996, when Congress enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) … it crafted a system for weeding out patently meritless claims and expeditiously removing the aliens making such claims from the country. It was Congress’s judgment that detaining all asylum seekers until the full-blown removal process is completed would place an unacceptable burden on our immigration system and that releasing them would present an undue risk that they would fail to appear for removal proceedings,” Justice Alito wrote in the opinion.
The statute imposed restrictions on the ability of asylum seekers to have the lawfulness of their detention reviewed, but, after Sri Lankan national Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam’s claim that he had a credible fear of persecution in his homeland was rejected, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed a lower court ruling and found he was entitled to challenge his detention in federal court.
The Supreme Court disagreed with the 9th Circuit, writing in the opinion that Congress is entitled to speed up the removal process, and according to the Supreme Court’s precedents, the detention review-limiting provisions in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act do not run afoul of the Constitution.
SCOTUS held that someone in Thuraissigiam’s position – being apprehended within 25 yards of the border – should be treated the same as someone who was taken into custody at the time they attempted to enter the country, and therefore the 1892 decision applies.
This comes after the Supreme Court stunned many last month with another immigration ruling.
In a massively controversial decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can’t immediately terminate the Obama-era Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
In a 5-4 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with Democrats and held that President Donald Trump can’t continue with his plan to end DACA, which has shielded roughly 800,000 young immigrants from deportation.
The Obama-era DACA program has shielded just shy of a million children that came to the United States with their parents, who also did not have the legal right to enter the country.
After the ruling, Trump said he planned to announce a new list of Supreme Court nominees by Sept. 1.
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