Supreme Court appears divided on immigration court notice requirements

The Supreme Court appeared divided Monday over what counted as proper notice the government should give to people facing deportation hearings.

The discussion, which lasted nearly two hours, focused on whether undocumented immigrants could challenge deportation orders if their initial summons to appear in court did not specify a time and date for the hearing.

The dispute focused on the interpretation of federal immigration law, but the broader debate over the country’s immigration system, which is seeing record numbers of migrants entering the country, has been central from the start.

The government’s lawyer, Charles L. McCloud, claimed that a decision in favor of undocumented immigrants threatens to upend “hundreds of thousands” of deportation orders that the courts have issued for “nearly three decades.” He predicted that “an avalanche” of cases “could be injected back into the immigration system.”

The attorney representing immigrants in the two consolidated cases, Easha Anand, argued that the government was “flouting the plain text” of federal immigration law by not providing people with court notices detailing the date and time of their hearings. were mentioned.

Despite the government’s argument that there would be “a parade of terrible things” if the court sides with the immigrants, Ms. Anand said it is unlikely that a majority of non-citizens will push for their cases to be reopened “because the best they get is another hearing.”

In previous cases on similar issues, she added, the judges had rejected the government’s arguments about the increased legal challenges. She said the court had ruled that “rough consequentialist calculations have no place” when “those consequences are a function of the government ignoring the text of the statute over many instances and many years.”

Federal immigration law requires government officials to give people notice that they must appear for a deportation hearing, including where the hearing will be held and when, part of the Constitution’s guarantee of due process.

The petitioners in the cases before the court, Campos-Chaves v. Garland and Garland v. Singh and Mendez-Colin, Nos. 22-674 and 22-884, allege that for years the Department of Homeland Security has employed a flawed process that points to that information piece by piece.

The court’s decision in this case will likely resolve divisions among federal appeals courts over how to handle such cases.

At the center of the case is Moris Esmelis Campos-Chaves, who fled El Salvador. On January 24, 2005, he entered the United States, wading across the Rio Grande near Laredo, Texas.

Mr. Campos-Chaves, who works as a landscaper, lives with his wife and their two children, both of whom were born in the United States.

In January 2005, Mr. Campos-Chaves received a summons for an immigration hearing. But the document did not mention the time and date. In May, the immigration court sent a notice with details of his hearing, scheduled for September, to a Texas address he gave to immigration officials. When he failed to show up for the hearing, an immigration judge ordered him deported.

In September 2018, he asked an immigration court to reopen his case, arguing that he had never received the details of his hearing and that his children would face exceptional hardship if he were deported.

After the judge rejected his request, he appealed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed with the lower court.

Mr Campos-Chaves asked the Supreme Court to take a position. His case joins those of Varinder Singh, an Indian citizen who entered the United States by climbing a fence at the Mexican border, and Raul Daniel Mendez-Colín, a citizen of Mexico who crossed the border with Arizona by car crossed.

The petitioners say the government provides undocumented immigrants with a form stating they will be heard. But the details of that hearing are provided later — sometimes years later — in a second notice from the immigration court.

Government attorneys argue that the notices taken together constitute proper notice of legal proceedings.

The court’s liberal justices, along with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, appeared critical of this interpretation.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor questioned Mr. McCloud about the government’s interpretation that its second notice, the first time an undocumented immigrant would receive the time and date of a court proceeding, merely changed the date.

“So change is not change?” she said. “This means you haven’t set a time and place yet, and we’re going to change that, and what? No time and place again?

Mr. McCloud responded that the government had already told the undocumented immigrant that a hearing would take place and had merely “moved from that temporary time to a specific time.”

Justice Gorsuch questioned this view, adding that current government rules “suggest that many things are required in a notice to appear, other than things the government finds inconvenient, such as the date of the hearing.” He said the government appeared to be making a “trust us” argument.

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. explored the meaning of “change” during an extended back-and-forth conversation with Ms. Anand.

He asked her if she wanted to “challenge the proposition that, as in ordinary language, there can be a change from an indefinite time or place to a definite time or place?”

Ms. Anand responded that “ordinary speakers of English do not use ‘change’ to refer to indefinite tense to determine time.” She gave the example of a bride sending out a wedding announcement.

“We don’t know the date yet,” she said. “When she sends her cards with the date, we call that a save the date, not a change the date.”