INS Denied Deportees’ Rights to Hearings, Court Affirms

A federal appeals court in California has upheld a nationwide injunction against the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for failing to notify thousands of people facing deportation of their right to contest allegations of using false documents.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday affirmed a lower court ruling that the INS had violated the Constitution by not alerting people charged with using false documents that they could request hearings to rebut the allegations.

In 1996, a U.S. District Court judge in Seattle barred the INS from continuing its current practices and ordered the government to provide clear information to immigrants about their rights.

Moreover, the INS was ordered to place media notices in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America to notify people who may have been wrongly deported because of allegations of document fraud without understanding those rights.

The appeals court opinion, authored by Judge Stephen Reinhardt after hearings in Pasadena, largely backed the lower court ruling. The judges assailed the “complexity and ineptness” of the INS procedures, concluding that even those with “a reasonable command of the English language would not receive adequate notice” from the agency.

About 5,000 immigrants nationwide faced deportation after being accused of using false documents under a 1990 law, according to Linton Joaquin of the National Immigration Law Center, who argued the case. Those accused are seeking hearings to contest the charges.

The INS has argued that everyone targeted had received adequate notice and that all who forfeited their right to a hearing on document fraud allegations did so knowingly.

Virginia Kice, an INS spokeswoman, said the government was still considering whether to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court. She declined to comment further.

The ruling comes a few days after a Court of Appeals decision in Boston last week that the government may not block the federal courts from reviewing deportation orders. The case is one of a number pending nationwide challenging so-called “court-stripping” powers that Congress enacted in 1996 to limit immigrants’ access to the federal courts.

Immigrant advocates have excoriated the new laws as anti-constitutional attacks on the rights of noncitizens and have aggressively challenged the landmark provisions. Civil libertarians lauded the two appeals court rulings on different coasts as underscoring the need for judicial oversight of the INS, which critics have often accused of abusing the rights of immigrants and non-immigrants alike.