Tag Archive for: Texas v. United States

DHS’s Family Reunification Parole Initiative Can Serve as Template for Other Bold Executive Actions to Reform the Immigration System Without Fear of Being Sued by a State

By Cyrus D. Mehta and Kaitlyn Box*

On July 7, 2023, DHS announced a new family reunification parole initiative for beneficiaries of approved I-130 petitions who are nationals of Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, & Honduras. Nationals of these countries can be considered for parole on a case-by-case basis for a period of up to three years while they wait to apply to become lawful permanent residents. This is an example of the administration using its executive authority to shape immigration policy in the absence of meaningful Congressional action to reform the system. Indeed, this initiative can serve as a template to allow beneficiaries of approved I-130, I-140, and I-526 petitions to be paroled into the US while they wait for a visa number to become available, which under the backlogs in the employment and family preference categories, can take several years to decades.

Section 212(d)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security, in his discretion, to parole noncitizens into the United States temporarily on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. The parole authority has long been used to establish family reunification parole (FRP) processes administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program, which was established in 2007, and the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program, which was established in 2014.

The processes begin, according to the DHS announcement, with the Department of State issuing an invitation to the petitioning U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident family member whose Form I-130 on behalf of a Colombian, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, or Honduran beneficiary has been approved. Beneficiaries awaiting an immigrant visa could include certain children and siblings of U.S. citizens and certain spouses and children of permanent residents. The invited petitioner can then initiate the process by filing a request on behalf of the beneficiary and eligible family members to be considered for advance travel authorization and parole.

The new processes allow for parole only on a discretionary, case-by-case, and temporary basis upon a demonstration of urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit, as well as a demonstration that the beneficiary warrants a favorable exercise of discretion. Individuals paroled into the United States under these processes will generally be considered for parole for up to three years and will be eligible to request employment authorization while they wait for their immigrant visa to become available. When their immigrant visa becomes available, they may apply to become a lawful permanent resident.

The Federal Register Notices for ColombiaEl SalvadorGuatemala, and Honduras provide more information on the FRP process and eligibility criteria.

According to the federal register notices, the justification for the new FRP initiative is part of a broader, multi-pronged, and regional strategy to address the challenges posed by irregular migration through the Southwest border. Consideration of noncitizens for parole on a case-by-case basis will meaningfully contribute to the broader strategy of the United States government (USG) to expand access to lawful pathways for individuals who may otherwise undertake an irregular migration journey to the United States. The case-by-case parole of noncitizens with approved family-based immigrant visa petitions under this process will, in general, provide a significant public benefit by furthering the USG’s holistic migration management strategy, specifically by: (1) promoting family unity; (2) furthering important foreign policy objectives; (3) providing a lawful and timely alternative to irregular migration; (4) reducing strain on limited U.S. resources; and (5) addressing root causes of migration through economic stability and development supported by increased remittances.

It remains to be seen whether states like Texas will attack this program in federal court. A similar humanitarian parole program has been the subject of a lawsuit by Texas and nineteen other states, and  allows 30,000 qualifying nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to be admitted to the United States every month for up to two years. The new FRP initiative is more narrowly tailored as it applies only to spouse, children and sibling beneficiaries of  approved I-130 petitions. Also, in United States v.  Texas, the Supreme Court in an 8-1 majority opinion rendered a blow to Texas and Louisiana in holding that they had no standing to challenge the Biden administration on federal immigration policy on enforcement priorities. Although that case dealt with whether a state could challenge the federal government’s ability to exercise prosecutorial discretion, it can also potentially deter a state’s ability to demonstrate standing when it challenges other federal immigration policies.

In Texas’ challenge to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Texas has argued that it is entitled to “special solicitude.” The doctrine first enunciated in Massachusetts v. EPA allows states to skirt some of the usual standing requirements, like whether the court can redress an alleged injury. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh addressed the doctrine in a footnote in United States v. Texas stating that the states’ reliance on Massachusetts v. EPA to support their argument for standing was misplaced. Massachusetts v. EPA held that the state could challenge the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to regulate greenhouse gases based on special solicitude, although that case dealt with a “statutorily authorized petition for rulemaking, not a challenge to an exercise of the executive’s enforcement discretion,” the footnote said. Another footnote in Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion said lower courts need to be mindful of constraints on lawsuits filed by states, saying that indirect effects on state spending from federal policies don’t confer standing. Still, Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion in United States v. Texas left open the possibility that “a challenge to an Executive Branch policy that involves both the Executive Branch’s arrest or prosecution priorities and the Executive Branch’s provision of legal benefits or legal status could lead to a different standing analysis”. Note that Justice Kavanaugh said that it “could” lead to a different standing analysis and not that it would.

Florida has already challenged the Biden administration’s “Parole Plus Alternatives to Detention” (Parole+ATD) and “Parole with Conditions in Limited Circumstances Prior to the Issuance of a Charging Document” (PWC) policies in Florida v. Mayorkas  that is currently pending before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In a brief filed on July 5, 2023, the government argued that the “special solicitude” doctrine proffered by states in United States v. Texas. should not apply in the humanitarian parole context. Florida asserted that it was entitled to special solicitude for the same reasons articulated by Texas in United States v. Texas – “a challenge to its sovereignty and indirect fiscal costs flowing from the presence of more noncitizens in its state.” Because the Supreme Court rejected an almost identical argument for the application of special solicitude in United States v. Texas, the government argued that Florida is similarly not entitled to avail of the doctrine.

The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Texas could have interesting implications for challenges to DACA, as well, and DACA recipients as intervenors have filed additional briefing to the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas in US v. Texas, Case No. 1:18-CV-68. In his concurrence in United States v. Texas, Justice Gorsuch argued that the harm Texas and the states that joined it were concerned with – primarily increased spending to provide healthcare and other services to higher numbers of undocumented immigrants present in the state – was not redressable. Although an injunction would prevent the implementation of the Biden administration’s enforcement guidelines, Justice Gorsuch argued that this remedy was unavailable to the states because of 8 U. S. C. § 1252(f )(1), which provides that “no court (other than the Supreme Court) shall have jurisdiction or authority to enjoin or restrain the operation of ” certain immigration laws, including the provisions that the states want to see enforced. The district court attempted to avoid offending this provision by “vacating” the Biden administrations guidelines instead of issuing an injunction, but Judge Gorsuch argued in part that a vacatur order nullifying the guidelines does nothing to redress the states’ supposed injuries because the “federal officials possess the same underlying prosecutorial discretion”, even in the absence of the guidelines. DACA recipients argued that this program also represents an exercise of inherent prosecutorial discretion, and states’ challenge of the program therefore suffers from the same redressability problem identified by Judge Gorsuch. Similarly, the states challenging the DACA program have alleged indistinct injuries similar to those articulated by Texas in United States v. Texas. Because the Supreme Court found that Texas lacked standing to challenge the Biden administration’s guidelines, DACA recipients have argued that states do not have stating to challenge the DACA program based on similar theories.

DOJ attorneys and intervenor defendants filed a joint motion on July 7, 2023, asking Judge Tipton of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas to delay a bench trial in the earlier lawsuit filed by Texas to challenge the Biden administration’s parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Although the motion argued that the outcome of United States v.  Texas would determine whether Texas had standing in the federal suit, Judge Tipton predictably declined to push back the trial date. Texas had previously argued that the parole program is distinguishable from the Biden administration’s enforcement guidelines because “[w]hatever discretion [the administration] might have in choosing which aliens to arrest or otherwise take into custody, [it has] no discretion to parole into the country aliens who do not meet the statutory criteria for parole.” At this point, states like Texas are arguing that their legal challenges to Biden’s earlier humanitarian parole or DACA program can be distinguished from United States v. Texas, which involved enforcement priorities, while the Biden administration and intervenors such as DACA recipients are arguing that Texas should not have standing to challenge even other immigration programs.

Returning to the idea of how this initiative can be broadened, parole can potentially be expanded to all beneficiaries of approved I-130, I-140, and I-526 petitions who are waiting overseas in the green card backlogs. Even if parole is expanded, the administration can still remain faithful to INA § 212(d)(5) by approving parole on a discretionary and case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or a significant public benefit. For instance, it may be possible to justify the parole of certain beneficiaries of I-526 petitions who have made a minimum investment of  $500,000 in a US business prior to May 15, 2022 or $800,000 after this date,  and created 10 jobs as that could be considered a significant public benefit. The same justification can be made for certain beneficiaries of approved I-140 petitions in the EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 preference categories whose presence in the US can benefit US employers who have sponsored them through the labor certification process or who have demonstrated that they are either persons of extraordinary ability or are well situated to advance the national interest of the United States. Beneficiaries of approved I-130 petitions who are caught in backlogs can make a justification for parole for urgent humanitarian reasons to unite with family members in the US.

Out of the four proposals Cyrus Mehta made to the Biden administration in May 2021 for reforming the legal immigration system without waiting for Congress to act, we are happy to see that two have come to fruition- parole for beneficiaries of I-130 petitions and using the Dates for Filing (DFF) for protecting the age of the child under the Child Status Protection Act. Cyrus Mehta has also proposed that the administration has the authority to advance the DFF in the State Department Visa Bulletin to current to maximize the number of people who can file for adjustment of status in the US. Cyrus Mehta has also proposed that there is nothing in INA § 203(d) that requires the counting of derivatives in  the family and employment green card preferences, although since the submission of this proposal, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in Wang v. Blinken ruled that INA § 203(d) requires the counting of derivative. Hence, any hope of administrative reform with regards to the unitary counting of family members has been shelved for the time being unless Congress is able to provide clarification on §203(d). Even if the administration issues a new interpretation to INA § 203(d) and abandons the position it took in Wang v. Blinken, the DC Circuit Court of Appeal’s interpretation will still prevail within the jurisdiction.

As Texas v. United States has made it harder for a state like Texas, which has reflexively sued on every immigration policy to get standing, the Biden administration should consider moving forward more boldly by reforming the immigration system through executive actions without fear of being sued by these states. It may be no coincidence that the latest family reunification parole initiative was unveiled within two weeks of the favorable ruling for the Biden administration in Texas v. United States!

[This blog is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as a substitute for legal advice]

*Kaitlyn Box is a Senior Associate at Cyrus D. Mehta & Partners PLLC.

An Eventful Thursday for Immigration Law at the Supreme Court: United States v. Texas, Mathis v. United States, and What’s Next

On Thursday, June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two decisions of significance to immigration law: a 4-4 affirmance without opinion in United States v. Texas, and a 5-3 decision in Mathis v. United States.  The first, which was more obviously immigration-related, is very disappointing and has rightly received a great deal of media attention, but the second is also worth noting and is somewhat more positive.

 

The Court’s evenly-divided decision – or one might say lack of decision – in United States v. Texas left standing the previous 2-1 decision of a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which had upheld District Judge Andrew Hanen’s preliminary injunction against Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and against the related expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA+”).  This is quite a momentous outcome to have been reached without explanation.  As former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger has written: “It is hard to know what to say about an immigration opinion affecting 4.3 million people that reads, in its entirety: ‘The judgment is affirmed by an equally divded Court.’  Seldom have so many hopes been crushed by so few words.”

 

It has long been customary for an evenly divided Supreme Court to affirm the judgment below without offering opinions, as was done here (and has been done since at least 1909), although this is not a custom followed by all multi-member appellate courts in the United States.  The Court of Appeals for the First Circuit sitting en banc, for example, has provided opinions explaining the views of its judges when it has divided 3 to 3 in recent years and so affirmed the district courts below, as in the immigration detention case of Castaneda v. Souza, on which the First Circuit split in December 2015.  If the Supreme Court were to adopt a similar custom, one would at least have the satisfaction of knowing the reasoning behind the Justices’ votes.  In this particular case, one might also have hoped that some of the Justices who voted to affirm the Fifth Circuit could have been convinced to change their minds by a compelling dissenting opinion that they knew they would have to confront publicly, although presumably draft opinions were circulated internally, given the long lapse of time between oral argument in the case on April 16 and the issuance of decision last week.  The 4-4 deadlock, and the Supreme Court’s custom of not issuing opinions in that scenario, has left those Justices who voted to affirm the Fifth Circuit in the position of being able to do so without having to explain formally and publicly why such a position is legally coherent.

 

While it is frustrating that the injunction in United States v. Texas was affirmed without explanation and without any precedential decision, however, this does have the benefit of leaving the door open for a different outcome in the long run.  United States v. Texas could return to the Supreme Court once a 9th Justice is seated on the Court, and potentially be decided differently, in one of at least two ways.

 

First, as SCOTUSBlog pointed out soon after the 4-4 decision came down, the government can petition the Supreme Court to rehear the case, and ask that the petition be held until a 9th Justice is seated on the Court.  Former Solicitor General Dellinger also endorsed that approach in his above-quoted post at Slate’s “Supreme Court Breakfast Table”.  This would be one way for U.S. v. Texas to come back before the Supreme Court, potentially quite quickly after a 9th Justice is seated.  Under Supreme Court Rule 44, a petition for rehearing ordinarily will only be granted both “by a majority of the Court” and “at the instance of a Justice who concurred in the judgment or decision”, but it is unclear how this latter requirement could possibly be applied in the case of a 4-4 affirmance without opinion, where the Court has not issued its own judgment and there is no public record of any Justice concurring in the affirmance more than any other Justice.  Thus, it appears that an ordinary majority, presumably composed of the 4 Justices who voted to reverse plus a newly arrived 9th Justice, could grant a petition for rehearing if it were still pending when a 9th Justice were confirmed.

 

SCOTUSBlog also noted today, however, that the Court had denied one petition in another case seeking such rehearing by a 9-member Court, which may not bode well for the rehearing possibility.  Specifically, the Court denied rehearing in Hawkins v. Community Bank of Raymore, which had been the subject of an affirmance without opinion by an equally divided Court on March 22, 2016.  One might think, though, that there is a significant difference between a case like U.S. v. Texas, decided just before the end of the term and affecting national policy so substantially, and a case like Hawkins, in which the Court failed 3 months earlier to reach a conclusion regarding the questions “(1) Whether “primarily and unconditionally liable” spousal guarantors are unambiguously excluded from being Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) “applicants” because they are not integrally part of “any aspect of a credit transaction”; and (2) whether the Federal Reserve Board has authority under the ECOA to include by regulation spousal guarantors as “applicants” to further the purposes of eliminating discrimination against married women.”  Without meaning to minimize the significance of discrimination against married women seeking credit, one might reasonably suggest that this sort of garden-variety issue of statutory interpretation does not call for unusual procedural measures to achieve a final, reasoned resolution to the same extent as the issue of the legitimacy of DAPA and DACA+.

 

Even if rehearing is not granted, it is likely that U.S. v. Texas may ultimately return to the Supreme Court, unless it is rendered moot in the meantime by Congressional enactment of comprehensive immigration reform or recission of DAPA by a hypothetical Republican President.  (Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, has made quite clear that she would seek to defend and expand administrative relief such as DAPA, not rescind it.)  The injunction issued by Judge Hanen and upheld by the Fifth Circuit was a preliminary injunction, and the case would now ordinarily be expected to proceed to a trial on the merits, or at least some sort of further proceedings.  At the conclusion of such further proceedings, Judge Hanen may then issue a permanent injunction.  The grant of such a permanent injunction could be appealed back to the Fifth Circuit, and if it were again affirmed by the Fifth Circuit, the government could seek certiorari from the Supreme Court regarding that affirmance.  One hopes that by the time the case worked its way back up through the Fifth Circuit to the Supreme Court in this fashion, there will be a 9th Justice seated on the Supreme Court.

 

There has also been some speculation that a new case regarding DAPA and DACA+ could be commenced, in a Circuit other than the Fifth Circuit, which might come out differently and create a circuit split.  It may be unlikely that such other litigation, even if deemed feasible, would make it back to the Supreme Court sooner than one of the other two routes discussed above.  If there is a way to launch such other litigation despite the current national scope of the injunction against DAPA and DACA+, however, it could have other benefits: David Leopold, for example, suggests in a recent blog post that further litigation might allow DAPA and DACA+ to go into effect in portions of the United States even if not nationwide.  Achieving such a goal would be difficult, given the current nationwide injunction against DAPA and DACA+ issued by Judge Hanen and upheld by the Fifth Circuit, but it appears that some intelligent and creative attorneys may be looking to see if they can find a way.

 

Ultimately, however, it appears that the future of DAPA and DACA+ will likely depend on who (if anyone) fills the currently vacant 9th seat on the Supreme Court.  In this, as in many other things, the outcome of this November’s elections will be crucial.

 

If Hillary Clinton is elected President and the Democrats retake the majority in the Senate, the 9th Justice who would be confirmed, whether that is President Obama’s nominee Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit or a new nominee put forward by President Clinton, would likely vote to overturn the injunction against DAPA and DACA+ if and when the case returned to the Supreme Court.  In the tragic event of a Donald Trump Presidency, on the other hand, the issue would be moot, since DAPA and DACA+ would be rescinded anyway.  In the event that Hillary Clinton is elected President and the Republicans maintain control of the Senate, one hopes that they would not attempt to block a Supreme Court nomination indefinitely, but given the current behavior of the Senate Republican majority, one cannot be sure.  Therefore, a Democratic victory in not only the Presidential election, but also a sufficient number of Senate elections to reclaim the majority (requiring a net gain of at least four seats), would give the best hope for a revival of DAPA and DACA+.  If the Democrats can also regain the majority in the House of Representatives, then the issue of DAPA and DACA+ could be rendered moot in a much more pleasant way: comprehensive immigration reform, along the lines of the Senate CIR bill S.744 that was passed by the Democratic Senate with a bipartisan majority in 2013 but denied a vote in 2013 and 2014 in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, could become law.  Hopefully, many of the U.S. citizen relatives of those who would be affected by DAPA, DACA+, or comprehensive immigration reform will be motivated by these possibilities to turn out and vote in November.

 

Until comprehensive immigration reform becomes law or DAPA and DACA+ come into effect, however, immigration attorneys will remain on the lookout for other small pieces of good news where we can find them.  The Supreme Court’s decision Thursday in Mathis v. United States, while at first glance not about an immigration case at all, provided just such a piece of good news for noncitizens with certain types of criminal convictions.  (Since most significant criminal convictions would have precluded applying for DAPA and DACA+, the set of noncitizens who will benefit from Mathis has very little overlap with the set of those harmed by U.S. v. Texas, so it may only be from the perspective of immigration attorneys that Thursday was something of a good news / bad news situation; hopefully I do not strike the reader as too insensitive for examining the two decisions in one blog post nonetheless.)

 

Mathis was primarily a sentencing case, arising under the Armed Career Criminal Act, or ACCA.  That statute provides for harsher criminal sentences against those with certain sorts of prior criminal convictions.  ACCA has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to provide for a “categorical approach”, where what is important is what one can be certain a person has been convicted of, that is, the elements of their crime, and not other facts regarding what they may actually have done in the past.

 

In its use of the categorical approach, ACCA operates similarly to several provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) regarding noncitizens with criminal convictions.  As the Supreme Court explained in Moncrieffe v. Holder, 569 U.S. ____, 133 S.Ct. 1678 (2013), the categorical approach, grounded in the language of immigration statutes that ask what a noncitizen was “convicted” of, “has a long pedigree in our Nation’s immigration law.”  Indeed, it goes back more than 100 years, at least back to the Second Circuit’s decision in United States ex rel. Mylius v. Uhl, 210 F.860 (2d Cir. 1914).  There are some provisions of immigration law that have been interpreted to deviate from the categorical approach, such as the $10,000 loss threshold for a fraud crime to qualify as an aggravated felony under section 101(a)(43)(M)(i) of the INA, addressed in the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Nijhawan v. Holder, but they are the exception, not the rule.

 

Because both ACCA cases and many areas of immigration law rely on the categorical approach, the reasoning of ACCA cases is often found to control in immigration cases.  Moncrieffe, for example, which addressed the immigration consequences of a conviction under Georgia law for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, cited and relied upon Shepard v. United States, 544 U.S. 13 (2005), and Johnson v. United States, both ACCA cases.  (The particular ACCA provision involved in Johnson was held unconstitutionally vague by the Court, but the principles behind the categorical approach were still usefully elucidated in that case.)  Footnote 2 of the Mathis majority opinion specifically acknowledged the applicability of the categorical approach discussed in Mathis to immigration cases, citing Kawashima v. Holder, 565 U. S. 478, 482–483 (2012).

 

In both the ACCA context and the immigration context, issues have arisen regarding the application of the categorical approach to what are known as “divisible” statutes.  In effect, such statutes contain multiple separate crimes, and so one can look at the record of the conviction, using what is known as the “modified categorical approach” to determine which of these crimes applied.  The Supreme Court clarified in Mathis that this is only to be done when the difference between the components of the statute of conviction turns on a true element, a fact on which a jury would have to agree to convict, or which a defendant would have to admit in a guilty plea.  It does not apply to alternate means of commission of a crime, even if they are listed in the statute of conviction.

 

Mr. Mathis had been convicted multiple times of burglary under Iowa law, which covered unlawful entry into “any building, structure, [or] land, water or air vehicle.”  Mathis, slip op. at 5.  For ACCA purposes, on the other hand, the Court had held years earlier that a conviction only counted as “burglary” if it involved unlawful entry into a building or other structure.  The question thus became whether one could look at the record of Mr. Mathis’s conviction to see whether he had been convicted of breaking into a building or other structure, on the one hand, which would qualify as ACCA “burglary”, or breaking into a land, water or air vehicle, which would not so qualify.  Iowa case law made clear that these were merely alternative means of committing a single crime, and that a jury could convict someone of burglary without agreeing on whether the defendant had burgled a building or a vehicle.  The government sought nevertheless, however, to argue based on documents from Mr. Mathis’s prior criminal cases that he had in fact been convicted of burglarizing a house and not a vehicle.

 

In a decision written by Justice Kagan and joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Thomas, and Sotomayor, the Court held that this was not permissible.  Facts on which a jury need not be unanimous are not elements of a crime, and so the Iowa burglary statute at issue was not truly divisible: it created only one crime, not many.  Because the categorical approach focuses on what the defendant was convicted of doing, and not what he or she may have actually done, one cannot pick through the record of a prior case and speculate regarding whether the jury might have agreed on something that the law did not require it to agree on in order to convict.

 

Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Ginsburg, dissented, arguing that if the record revealed that evidence supported conviction of a defendant only pursuant to one statutory word or phrase, it should not matter whether that word or phrase was termed an element or a means.  Justice Alito, writing only for himself, compared the Court’s ACCA case law to a Belgian woman who had set out for Brussels and ended up in Zagreb, Croatia, by following her GPS too unquestioningly.  Accusing the majority of “pointless formalism”, he hypothesized a lengthy plea colloquy in which a defendant admitted to burglarizing a house at “10 Main St.” in the face of lengthy questioning from the judge regarding whether this address might represent a yacht, house boat, trailer, or tent.  (The hypothetical defendant’s response to this last query was said to be, “No, it’s made of brick.  I scraped my knee on the brick.”)  Even in this case, he lamented, “[a]s the Court sees things, none of this would be enough.”

 

Before addressing some of the implications of this decision for immigration purposes, I will pause to note that Justice Alito’s lengthy hypothetical colloquy, humorous though it may be, strikes me as not really supporting his argument, and perhaps even as weakening it.  In the real world, a judge would almost never go through such a lengthy discussion of the nature of the premises burgled if that did not affect the crime of which the defendant was to be convicted or the punishment for which the defendant was eligible.  If the defendant had actually broken into a car parked right outside the garage of the house at 10 Main Street to steal money and jewelry, rather than breaking into a car parked inside the garage and the garage itself to steal the same money and jewelry, one would not expect him to start an argument with the judge, in the context of a law which made the penalty for the two versions of the crime exactly the same.  Rather, if asked whether he broke into a “structure” at 10 Main Street, there is a good chance that such a hypothetical defendant would simply say “yes”, and that would be the end of it.  To quote from Justice Kagan’s majority opinion:

 

“At trial, and still more at plea hearings, a defendant may have no incentive to contest what does not matter under the law; to the contrary, he “may have good reason not to”—or even be precluded from doing so by the court. . . .  When that is true, a prosecutor’s or judge’s mistake as to means, reflected in the record, is likely to go uncorrected. See ibid. Such inaccuracies should not come back to haunt the defendant many years down the road by triggering a lengthy mandatory sentence.”

 

Justice Alito’s hypothetical colloquy, which I admit was quite funny, draws its humor partly from its unrealistic nature.

 

And just as the sorts of uncorrected inaccuracies to which Justice Kagan refers “should not come back to haunt the defendant many years down the road by triggering a lengthy mandatory sentence”, as Mathis makes clear, they also should not come back to haunt the defendant by triggering deportation.  In footnote 3 of Mathis, Justice Kagan specifically notes a scenario in which the Mathis rule will apply to immigration cases:

 

To see the point most clearly, consider an example arising in the immigration context: A defendant charged under a statute that criminalizes “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” assaulting another—as exists in many States, see, e.g., Tex. Penal Code Ann. §22.01(a)(1) (West Cum. Supp. 2015)—has no apparent reason to dispute a prosecutor’s statement that he committed the crime intentionally (as opposed to recklessly) if those mental states are interchangeable means of satisfying a single mens rea element. But such a statement, if treated as reliable, could make a huge difference in a deportation proceeding years in the future, because an intentional assault (unlike a reckless one) qualifies as a “crime involving moral turpitude,” and so requires removal from the country.

 

Under Mathis, if recklessness and intentional assault are indeed interchangeable means of satisfying the same mens rea requirement under a particular statute, then for immigration purposes the statute cannot be divided between them.

 

That is, even someone who seemingly pled guilty to intentional conduct, under such an indivisible statute, should be considered as if he or she had only pled guilty to reckless conduct, because, as Moncrieffe explained, “we must presume that the conviction “rested upon [nothing] more than the least of th[e] acts” criminalized,” 133 S. Ct. at 1684.  As Mathis’s footnote 3 explains, this makes more sense than might at first glance appear, because someone convicted under such a statute would have had no reason to dispute the allegation that he or she had acted intentionally rather than recklessly—unless perhaps he or she had consulted immigration counsel prior to entering a plea.  Allowing the proverbial hairs of a state statute’s text to be split, adversely to the noncitizen, beyond the point where the distinction makes any difference under state law, would penalize those who did not have immigration consequences in mind at the time of their plea or trial.  Certainly, for a variety of reasons, all noncitizens charged with a crime should consult with a competent immigration attorney before pleading to any charge or otherwise proceeding with their criminal case, but the law should not unnecessarily and unfairly penalize those who fail to heed this advice.

 

The distinction between recklessness and intentional conduct is not the only context in which this means/elements distinction may have relevance for immigration law.  For example, attorneys whose clients have been convicted of possession of a controlled substance, under state laws covering at least some substances not federally controlled, should explore whether the identity of the substance is an element or a means under the relevant state law—whether, in order to obtain a conviction, the state is required to prove which controlled substance a defendant possessed.  If the identity of the substance is a means and not an element, then the conviction may, under Mathis, fall within the protection of the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Mellouli v. Lynch, which required a controlled substance conviction to relate to a federally controlled substance in order to cause adverse immigration consequences.  (The Third Circuit’s 2013 en banc decision in Rojas v. Attorney General rejected what it called the “formal categorical approach” in this controlled-substance context, but it is not clear that this aspect of Rojas can survive the combination of Mellouli and Mathis in states where the identity of the controlled substance is a means and not an element under state law, although we will have to wait and see how the case law develops to be sure.)  There will be other areas, as well, where a statute which lists multiple ways of committing a crime is actually indivisible under state law, and so a noncitizen is entitled under Moncrieffe and Mathis to the assumption that he or she committed the crime in whichever way is least harmful for immigration purposes.

 

Mathis is therefore good news for a significant number of immigrants, and their attorneys, even though this small piece of good news may pale in comparison to the disappointment of U.S. v. Texas and the continued injunction against DAPA and DACA+, which are bad news for substantially more immigrants.  With respect to the latter, we can hope for, and fight for, the possibility that the November elections may bring more good news.

Impact of Texas v. USA on Other Executive Actions Involving Employment Authorization

Although the Fifth Circuit in Texas v. USA ruled against the Administration on November 9, 2015 by upholding the preliminary injunction against implementation of President Obama’s program to grant deferred action to certain groups of undocumented persons, the ruling may impact other executive actions that President Obama had announced on November 20, 2014, especially relating to skilled immigrants. It is thus important for the the Supreme Court to reverse this erroneous decision to not only allow the Administration to implement Deferred Action for Parental Accountability program  and the expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program (collectively referred to as DAPA in the decision), but to also allow the Administration to grant other kinds of administrative relief such as interim employment authorization to immigrants who face great hardship and are deprived of the benefits accorded to them under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The majority’s ruling in the Fifth Circuit went even further than Judge Hanen’s decision in the lower district court by holding that DAPA was not authorized under any INA provision. Judge Hanen’s ruling suggested that if the Administration had followed the notice and comment procedure under section 553 of the Administrative Procedures Act, DAPA could have survived judicial scrutiny. The Fifth Circuit, on the other hand, held that since DAPA implicated “questions of deep economic and political significance,” Congress would have expressly authorized DHS, which it did not do. Hence, DAPA was a substantive APA violation under section 706(2) as it was not authorized under the INA. Thus, promulgating a rule at this juncture will not help to save DAPA.

One of the INA provisions relied on by the government to implement DAPA is INA section 274(h)(3), which provides:

As used in this section, the term “unauthorized alien” means, with respect to the employment of an alien at a particular time, that the alien is not at that time either (A) an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or (B) authorized to be so employed by this chapter or by the Attorney General.

While the ability to of INA 274A(h)(3) to provide authority to the Administration was  completely overlooked in Judge Hanen’s decision (and his flawed decision is discussed in David Isaacson’s excellent blog entitled IGNORING THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: AN INITIAL REACTION TO JUDGE HANEN’S DECISION ENJOINING DAPA AND EXPANDED DACA), the Fifth Circuit took notice of INA 274(h)(3), but gave it short shrift by observing that this provision, which is listed as a miscellaneous definitional provision is an unlikely place to find authorization for DAPA.

Contrary to the Fifth Circuit’s gloss, INA 274A(h)(3)  gives the Attorney General, and now the Secretary of Homeland Security, broad  flexibility to authorize an alien to be employed, thus rendering the alien not an “unauthorized alien” under the INA.  Indeed, INA 274(h)(3) was invoked by the DHS in promulgating a rule providing employment authorization for H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B visa holders in the US who are caught in the employment based second and third preference backlogs. INA 274A(h)(3) will also most likely be invoked when the DHS promulgates a rule to grant work authorization to beneficiaries of approved employment-based I-140 petitions who are waiting for their green cards in the backlogged employment preferences.

Indeed, if INA 274A(h)(3) is discredited, as suggested by the Fifth Circuit,  many other justifications for providing an employment authorization document (EAD) would collapse.  The reason the EAD regulations are principally located in 8 CFR 274a, after all, is that the authority for most of them has always been thought to stem from INA 274A. While many of the 8 CFR 274a.12(a) EADs have some specific statutory authorization outside of INA 274A(h)(3), which is why they exist incident to status, many 8 CFR 274a.12(c) EAD categories are based on INA 274A(h)(3) in just the same way that  8 CFR 274a.12(c)(14) EADs for deferred action are.  People with pending adjustment applications under 8 CFR 274a.12(c)(9), including the “class of 2007” adjustment applicants, pending cancellation applications under 8 CFR 274a.12(c)(10), pending registry applications under 8 CFR 274a.12(c)(16), all get EADs based on that same statutory authority.  Even the B-1 domestic workers and airline employees at 8 CFR 274a.12(c)(17) have no separate statutory authorization besides 274A(h)(3). Some (c) EADs have their own separate statutory authorization, such as pending-asylum 8 CFR 274a.12(c)(8) EADs with their roots in INA 208(d)(2), and 8 CFR 274a.12(c)(18) final-order EADs with arguable roots in INA 241(a)(7), but they are in the minority.  And even some of the subsection (a) EADs have no clear statutory basis outside 274A(h)(3), such as 8 CFR 274a.12(a)(11) for deferred enforced departure.  If the Fifth Circuit’s theory is taken to its logical conclusion, it would destroy vast swathes of the current employment-authorization framework.

It is thus important for the Supreme Court to uphold the Administration’s authority to implement DAPA as part of its broad authority to exercise prosecutorial discretion, without the need to undermine INA 274A(h)(3). As I have advocated in FIFTH CIRCUIT PRECEDENT ON PREEMPTION CAN PROVIDE OBAMA WITH PATH TO VICTORY IN TEXAS v. UNITED STATES, the government’s authority to exercise prosecutorial discretion, which includes deferred action, is non-justiciable and notwithstanding the Fifth Circuit decision, never required rule making. The dissenting opinion in the Fifth Circuit decision thankfully held that deferred action, which is a quintessential exercise of prosecutorial discretion, is non-justiciable.  Indeed, one of the principal reasons why state regulations have been held to  conflict with federal immigration law is because they interfere with the Administration’s ability to exercise prosecutorial discretion. While on first brush Texas v. USA is not a preemption case, it would still provide a basis for any cantankerous state politician to sue the federal government, under the broad and dubious standing theory  that the Fifth Circuit provided to Texas, whenever the federal government chooses to exercise prosecutorial discretion. While the DACA program of 2012 will be the most vulnerable, if the Supreme Court were to uphold the Fifth Circuit’s majority decision, another court would hopefully reach another conclusion with respect to INA 274A(h)(3) as providing the authority to the Administration to grant work authorization in many other contexts.

The Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States132 S.Ct. 2492, 2499 (2012), articulated the federal government’s authority  to exercise prosecutorial discretion rather elaborately:

A principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials…… Federal officials, as an initial matter, must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all. If removal proceedings commence, aliens may seek asylum and other discretionary relief allowing them to remain in the country or at least to leave without formal removal….

Discretion in the enforcement of immigration law embraces immediate human concerns. Unauthorized workers trying to support their families, for example, likely pose less danger than alien smugglers or aliens who commit a serious crime. The equities of an individual case may turn on many factors, including whether the alien has children born in the United States, long ties to the community, or a record of distinguished military service. Some discretionary decisions involve policy choices that bear on this Nation’s international relations. Returning an alien to his own country may be deemed inappropriate even where he has committed a removable offense or fails to meet the criteria for admission. The foreign state maybe mired in civil war, complicit in political persecution, or enduring conditions that create a real risk that the alien or his family will be harmed upon return. The dynamic nature of relations with other countries requires the Executive Branch to ensure that enforcement policies are consistent with this Nation’s foreign policy with respect to these and other realities.

The majority of the Supreme Court  justices ought to  latch onto the dissenting opinion, which is the correct opinion, and should reverse the preliminary injunction on the ground that the President’s executive actions regarding DAPA are non-justiciable, and thus leave alone INA 274A(h)(3). The Administration ought to be provided flexibility to provide ameliorative relief, especially EAD under INA 274A(h)(3) to a number of non-citizens needing relief. The prime example are those who have to wait for decades in the India EB-2 and EB-3 backlogs for their green card, even though they have otherwise fulfilled all the conditions. Due to the lack of a current priority date, beneficiaries who are otherwise approved for permanent residence ought to be able to obtain EADs, and the same also should apply to H-4 spouses of H-1B visa holders who are caught in the employment based backlogs. Also, researchers, inventors and founders of startup enterprises ought to be paroled into the US and issued EADs under the broad authority provided in INA 274A(h)(3), and this too is one of the initiatives contemplated in the President’s  November 20, 2014 executive actions.  There are many good reasons why the Administration should be allowed to issue work authorization to noncitizens, and INA 274A(h)(3) ought not be reinterpreted to curtail this flexibility.

Equating Immigrants to Greenhouse Gases: Is This a Valid Basis for Standing to Sue The Federal Government?

It has lately become fashionable for states that oppose President Obama’s immigration executive actions to sue in federal court on grounds that they are unconstitutional.  But in order to get heard in court, a state must demonstrate standing.        

In the Texas v. United States litigation challenging President Obama’s November 2014 Deferred Action for Parent Accountability Program (DAPA) and expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) programs, plaintiff states led by Texas successfully invoked standing by equating immigrants to noxious air pollutants that cause greenhouse gases. While greenhouse gases can only cause harm, immigrants, legal or not, are more likely to confer benefits than harm. Is it appropriate for a judge to give standing to a state opposing federal immigration policy based on the sort of harm that pollutants would cause it?

Parties seeking to resolve disputes in federal court must present actual “Cases” or “Controversies” under Article III of the US Constitution. Plaintiffs must demonstrate that they have standing in order to satisfy Article III. They must establish three elements set forth in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560 (1992) that there is 1) an injury in fact, (2) a sufficient causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision.

In Texas v. United States, the states attempted to show harm through the influx of immigrants who will remain in the United States through deferrals of their removals and thus burden them. The basis for linking the harm caused by immigrants to noxious pollutants stems from the seminal Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA in which plaintiffs requested the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles under section 202 of the Clean Air Act. After EPA refused to do so, plaintiffs, which included Massachusetts, sought review of the EPA’s refusal in the Supreme Court to regulate greenhouse gases. Massachusetts successfully sought standing under Lujan by showing that global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions was so widespread that the failure of the EPA to regulate them would cause the state environmental damage such as coastal flooding of its shores. Justice Steven delivered the opinion of the Court by beginning with this broad pronouncement on global warming:

A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species—the most important species—of a “greenhouse gas.”

Later, in showing how Massachusetts as a landowner would suffer injury even though global warming was widespread, Justice Stevens stated:

That these climate-change risks are “widely shared” does not minimize Massachusetts’ interest in the outcome of this litigation. [citation omitted]. According to petitioners’ unchallenged affidavits, global sea levels rose somewhere between 10 and 20 centimeters over the 20th century as a result of global warming. MacCracken Decl.  5(c), Stdg.App. 208. These rising seas have already begun to swallow Massachusetts’ coastal land. Id., at 196 (declaration of Paul H. Kirshen 5), 216 (MacCracken Decl.  23). Because the Commonwealth “owns a substantial portion of the state’s coastal property,” id., at 171 (declaration of Karst R. Hoogeboom  4),[citation omitted] it has alleged a particularized injury in its capacity as a landowner. The severity of that injury will only increase over the course of the next century: If sea levels continue to rise as predicted, one Massachusetts official believes that a significant fraction of coastal property will be “either permanently lost through inundation or temporarily lost through periodic storm surge and flooding events.” Id.,  6, at 172.[citation omitted]. Remediation costs alone, petitioners allege, could run well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Id., 7, at 172; see also Kirshen Decl.  12, at 198.[citation omitted]

While it is undeniable that greenhouse gases can cause only harm, should this case be applicable when a state uses it to invoke standing to challenge federal immigration policy? Texas, the lead plaintiff in Texas v. United States, argued that the President’s executive actions would cause a significant economic burden as deferring removal of certain classes of non-citizens would allow them to  apply for drivers licenses, which  in turn would cost the state several million dollars. Texas relied on this trifling economic burden as the injury that would give it standing,  which Judge Hanen accepted among other standing legal theories. After providing standing, Judge Hanen temporarily blocked the executive actions, and a trenchant criticism of his reasoning in doing so can be found here.  Judge Hanen elaborated at great length in equating the harm that Massachusetts would suffer through global warming with the harm that Texas would suffer as a result of “500,000 illegal aliens that enter the United States each year.” Judge Hanen went on to further expound his views on the harms caused by illegal immigration, as follows:

The federal government is unable or unwilling to police the border more thoroughly or apprehend those illegal aliens residing within the United States; thus it is unsurprising  that, according to prevailing estimates, there are somewhere between 11,000,000 and 12,000,000 illegal aliens currently living in the country, many of whom burden the limited resources in each state to one extent or another. Indeed, in many instances, the Government intentionally allows known illegal aliens to enter and remain in the country. 

While emphasizing the alleged harms that undocumented immigration would cause to the states, Judge Hanen gave short shrift to the well-reasoned amicus brief of 12 states   demonstrating the overwhelming benefits that DAPA and DACA would confer to the states.  Amici argued that the recipients of a prior DACA program in 2012, which was not challenged in the litigation, caused 60% of the recipients to find new jobs and that wages increased by over 240%. Allowing immigrants to work legally and increase their wages substantially increases the state tax base. The granting of deferred action also provides many social benefits, amici argued, as it allows parents to support US citizen children, thus reducing the cost of state social service benefits and it also allows families to remain united.  According to the amicus brief, “When fit parents are deported, it can be difficult for the State to find the parents and reunite them with their children. The existence of fit parents – even if they have been deported – can also prevent the State from seeking alternative placement options for a child, such as a guardianship or adoption by another family member or third party.[citation omitted]. Deferred deportation allows families to remain together, even if only temporarily.”The government appealed Judge Hanen’s preliminary injunction to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a hearing before a panel in the Fifth Circuit to lift the block while the government’s appeal was pending, Massachusetts v. EPA was again discussed, as presented in David Isaacson’s summary:

Continuing with the standing discussion, Judge Smith directed AAG Mizer to the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), which he considered to be a key case on the standing issue.  Mizer responded, first, that there isn’t a territorial effect in this case as in Massachusetts, where the state’s territory was being affected (by rising sea levels resulting from global warming).  Also, the specific statute in Massachusetts v. EPA gave a specific right to sue, while the INA, Mizer argued, “is not enacted to protect the states”.

The success of the legal challenges to President Obama’s executive actions hinges on whether courts will give plaintiffs standing or not. In Crane v. Johnson, the Fifth Circuit upheld the lower court’s finding that Mississippi, a plaintiff, did not have standing as its claim to fiscal injury arising out of deferral under the DACA 2012 program was speculative.  More recently, a three judge panel in the D.C. Circuit was skeptical of Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio’s challenge against DAPA and expanded DACA based on standing. While they were skeptical that the deferred action programs will result in more immigrants being detained in Maricopa County jails, one George W.  Bush appointee judge again cited Massachusetts’ standing to sue to prevent environmental harm from greenhouse gases by asking why “at least at the state level, isn’t concern about public safety and crime and that sort of things costs and crime should not be at least equal to the sovereignty concern to the sea level rise taking a few inches of shoreline.”

Although the government has argued in its appeal brief that the Clean Air Act gave a state such as Massachusetts the right to sue while the INA does not in the context of deferred action and prosecutorial discretion, a broader and more compelling argument can be made against invoking Massachusetts v. EPAin immigration litigation. Analogizing the ability of certain classes of immigrants to temporarily remain in the United States to greenhouse gases is both specious and offensive. It is well recognized that greenhouse gases only cause harm, and thus a state impacted by them can readily demonstrate injury in order to seek standing to sue the federal government. Immigrants, unlike greenhouse gases, bring great benefits to the United States. Any manufactured claim of harm by a state, like what Texas has claimed with the so called economic burden caused by issuing driver’s license, is far outweighed by the benefits that immigrants bring to this country. Apart from all the benefits that were discussed by the states opposing the legal challenge, even a second grader can figure out that handing out licenses to people who otherwise could not get it before deferral ensures that many more will drive safely in the state of Texas.

One would also not use this analogy in other contexts as it is highly offensive to link human beings to greenhouse gases.  Imagine if a state were to challenge a federal policy of providing federal benefits to same-sex married couples whose marriages are valid where celebrated but not in the state of their residence, on the basis that this policy led more same-sex married couples and their families to reside in that state and thus overburden its schools and public hospitals. If the state invoked Massachusetts v. EPA, it would be viewed as highly offensive and also not a very strong argument.  Plaintiffs seem to be getting away for the time being in linking immigrants to noxious pollutants, and it is hoped that some judge will strike down this odious analogy so that it is  no longer invoked in immigration litigation.