Immigrants with certain prior criminal convictions will now be placed in detention without the opportunity to petition for release.<\/b>
\nIn 2013, Juan Lozano Magdaleno gave a speech at his daughters wedding\u2014or, more accurately, he gave a speech from a detention facility, which his family played, over the phone on speaker, at the wedding reception. At the time, Magdaleno had spent almost five months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. Normally, someone like Magdaleno\u2014a 57-year-old grandfather, who had been a lawful resident in the United States since the day he arrived from Mexico as a teenager\u2014could ask the court to release him on bond while he waited out his deportation proceedings. A judge, after first confirming Magdaleno was not a flight risk or a danger to the community, couldve let Magdaleno go home.
But Magdaleno never had the option to petition for release, pay bail, or go home. On his record, he had two prior criminal convictions: one from 2000 and one from 2007. It did not matter that Magdaleno had already served his time in prison and re-entered the community. The Obama administration, interpreting a 1996 law, had decided that immigrants with criminal convictions, like Magdaleno, would be placed in mandatory, non-negotiable detention. This meant Magdaleno would never have the opportunity to ask a judge to let him make bail.
On Tuesday, after more than five years of legal proceedings, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision that ended such mandatory detention, putting the practice back in place. Now, immigrants with prior criminal convictions, like Magdaleno, will be placed in detention without the opportunity to petition for release\u2014even if their conviction is from decades earlier, and even though they may have already done their time in prison.
Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union\u2014which represented Magdaleno and two other immigrants in similar positions in the original federal lawsuit filed in 2013\u2014reacted to Tuesdays decision with dismay.
\u00ab\u00a0[T]he Supreme Court has endorsed the most extreme interpretation of immigration detention statutes, allowing mass incarceration of people without any hearing, simply because they are defending themselves against a deportation charge,\u00a0\u00bb Cecillia Wang, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, who argued the case, said in a statement.
Wang and the ACLU had argued that the federal statute in question had clearly been written to apply to immigrant offenders at the time of their release from prison\u2014not immigrants in deportation proceedings potentially decades after they served their time.
According to the statute (8 U. S. Code 1226), the attorney general \u00ab\u00a0shall take into custody any alien\u00a0\u00bb who is \u00ab\u00a0deportable by reason of having committed\u00a0\u00bb certain crimes \u00ab\u00a0when the alien is released.\u00a0\u00bb The ACLU argued that the language \u00ab\u00a0when the alien is released\u00a0\u00bb implies a strict timeframe for mandatory detention to be applicable.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority of the court, disagreed, arguing that such an interpretation might mean that \u00ab\u00a0even 24 hours is too long\u00a0\u00bb a gap between release and re-arrest for mandatory detention to be applied.
Justice Stephen Breyer, in his dissent, expressed concern about the power the decision gave the government: \u00ab\u00a0It is a power to detain persons who committed a minor crime many years before. And it is a power to hold those persons, perhaps for many months, without any opportunity to obtain bail.\u00a0\u00bb
Speaking with Pacific Standard last month, Madhuri Grewal, federal immigration policy counsel for the ACLU, asked why immigrant offenders were not granted the same sort of compassion as citizens: \u00ab\u00a0Theres all this talk about giving people second chances: If you commit a crime, that doesnt make you a bad person,\u00a0\u00bb Grewal said. \u00ab\u00a0But that hasnt translated into the immigration system. Theres no second chance. For immigrants, the crime\u2014and the label of criminal\u2014stays with them forever, even after theyve served their sentence.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n