{UAH} SUPREME COURT BLOCKS IMMIGRANTS AT BOARDER FROM SUING

Supreme Court sides with Trump, blocks migrants at border from suing over asylum denial

by Anna Giaritelli, Homeland Security Reporter | 

 

June 25, 2020 10:43 AM

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The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration by a 7-2 vote Thursday, deciding that immigrants in fast-tracked asylum proceedings whose claims have been denied early on in the process do not have the right to sue in federal court to appeal the decision.

The country’s highest court determined asylum-seekers were not entitled to habeas corpus, which would give them recourse to protest an expedited deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the Sri Lankan asylum-seeker in the suit, expects the decision will affect several thousand immigrants who make asylum claims after illegally entering the country.

The plaintiff, Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, was arrested after illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego, California. He told the Customs and Border Protection officer who interviewed him that he feared being returned to Sri Lanka because he had been kidnapped by government intelligence officials and tortured. Thuraissigiam said he was knocked unconscious and woke up in a hospital, where he decided to flee to the United States.

The officer who interviewed Thuraissigiam decided that the asylum-seeker did not have a credible fear because he lacked evidence proving he was targeted. U.S. policy states that asylum-seekers must prove their lives are at risk due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political affiliation.

Amid a surge of illegal immigration of Mexican citizens at the southern border in the mid-1990s, Congress created a new method for CBP to respond to the influx of immigrants it was arresting, allowing the agency to deport select immigrants within days instead of spending weeks or longer in detention. The process of “expedited removal” allowed federal law enforcement at the country’s borders to return anyone to their country who had been arrested within 100 miles of the border within the past two weeks for illegally entering the U.S. Immigrants eligible for expedited removal would no longer be given the right to counsel, a full immigration hearing, or the ability to appeal a decision.

“The expedited removal process provides drastically truncated administrative procedures, and virtually no judicial review of purely legal claims, and even of claims that the removal would violate the Constitution,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt wrote in a brief for the case.

Expedited removal was largely used for Mexicans who had been arrested trying to enter the U.S., but it was not intended for asylum-seekers. When Thuraissigiam did not pass the CBP officer’s credible fear interview, which is the first step in making an asylum claim before a federal immigration judge, he was slated to be returned to Sri Lanka quickly, unable to appeal the low-ranking officer’s decision.

Thuraissigiam asked an immigration judge, a Justice Department employee, to review the case. The judge sided with the CBP officer’s determination. The ACLU took on the case against the Department of Homeland Security, which rose through the court system and eventually to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with Thuraissigiam.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the court in a petition submitted last August that a ruling in support of Thuraissigiam would contribute to “undermining the government’s ability to control the border.”

Gelernt said 9,000 immigrants had been denied asylum and were unable to appeal the decision in the year since the 9th Circuit’s decision. Only 30 have appealed, he said.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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