U.S. Supreme Court

Abolish the ICE Prison Complex

Locking up migrants fighting to stay in the United States is permissible, the Supreme Court reiterated in February. The Court’s ruling mocks justice, but isn’t a big surprise. The federal laws under the Court’s consideration breathe life into a mean-spirited immigration law enforcement regime that holds tightly to the misguided belief that migrants pose a threat that prisons are best suited to extinguish. In Jennings v. Rodriguez, five justices overturned the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowing migrants detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement [...]

Supreme Court to hear another immigration imprisonment case

On the heels of its decision allowing prolonged confinement in an ICE detention center to continue, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear arguments in another case about the federal government’s practice or locking up migrants. Every day, the Department of Homeland Security detains roughly 34,000 individuals. At a cost of at least $126 per day per person, ICE spends more than $4 million daily to incarcerate. In Nielsen v. Preap, No. 14-16326, the Court will decide whether ICE is required to detain migrants who have served their jail or prison time for a laundry list of crimes and have [...]

Jennings v. Rodriguez highlights need for detention time limits

Justine N. Stefanelli The US Supreme Court’s decision in Jennings v. Rodriguez, 583 U.S. ___ (2018) (slip opinion), denying bail hearings to thousands of detainees is a serious blow to the rule of law. Detaining categories of people without regard to their individual circumstances is an arbitrary interference with the right to liberty and, at the very least, should be accompanied by procedural safeguards. The most obvious of these is a temporal limit on immigration detention. However, US immigration law provides no maximum. The closest the law has come is the setting of a presumptively [...]

Padilla should apply to all migrants

Of all the protections guaranteed by the United States Constitution, the right to counsel is arguably the most important. As the Supreme Court famously declared in Gideon v. Wainright, a criminal defendant simply cannot be “assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” Subsequent holdings also established that the right to counsel does not merely afford criminal defendants the euphemistic “warm body with a law degree.” Instead, the Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants the right to “the effective assistance” of counsel as well—both during trial and in pre-trial plea [...]

Border Patrol shoots, Supreme Court punts

Seven years ago, Border Patrol agent Jesús Mesa shot and killed fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca. On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to tell us whether Hernández’s parents can successfully sue agent Mesa. The aggrieved parents sued Mesa claiming that the officer violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution when he killed Hernández. They wanted Mesa to financially pay for violating their son’s constitutional rights, a claim brought under Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), which recognizes an implied right to sue federal [...]

Should ICE or an immigration judge decide that a migrant deserves imprisonment?

The script is fairly simple: someone gets arrested and without much delay he is haled into court where a judge decides whether to grant bail. As depicted on television, this happens as a matter of routine. Everyone, it seems, accepts that it’s a judge’s role to decide whether a person who has been arrested should remain jailed pending prosecution. Not so when it comes to immigration law. Migrants are frequently locked up without seeing an immigration judge. Today, the Supreme Court hears arguments about the legality of prolonged mandatory detention without a hearing. In Jennings v. [...]

Is the border truly a shoot-at-will location?

The Fourth Amendment offers a powerful bulwark against the state’s power to deprive people of their liberty. Only with the intercession of a neutral arbiter, the text indicates, can the government exercise its immense coercive powers. Anyone who has followed the evolution of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence over the last three decades knows that this promise is far from the reality. Along the border, however, even the watered-down state in which the Fourth Amendment hobbles along might be too much. Is it possible that a Border Patrol officer might have wielded his weapon too loosely, but the [...]

Fed govt misrepresentations about detention data matter

Last week we learned that the federal government provided the Supreme Court with bad data about the length of time migrants remain in detention. When? In 2002 as the Court geared up to consider what has become an enormously important decision, Demore v. Kim, 538 U.S. 510 (2002). In Demore, the Court held that the Immigration and Nationality Act’s so-called mandatory detention provision, § 236(c), is constitutionally permissible. For fourteen years, lower courts have dutifully followed the Court’s instruction. Now we know that the Court’s reasoning turned on wrong statistics. In its 2002 [...]