Legal Immigrants Can Challenge Deportation, Court Rules

Legal immigrants can go to court to challenge the government’s attempt to deport them for past crimes, a federal appeals court has ruled.

A recent federal law reduced, but did not eliminate, judicial review of deportation, said the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The court also held out hope to immigrants who pleaded guilty in the past to certain crimes, such as drug offenses, that became grounds for mandatory deportation under a 1996 federal law.

Those immigrants may still be eligible to remain in the country under a procedure called a waiver of deportation, which allows longtime legal residents to stay if they have close family ties to the United States and are rehabilitated, the court said Monday.

They must first persuade a federal judge that they would not have pleaded guilty if they had known a future law would require deportation for the crime.

Immigration officials have granted about half of the waiver applications in the past, said attorney Lucas Guttentag, national director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrants rights project.

The ruling “makes an enormous difference for all people whose cases were pending” when the 1996 law passed, Guttentag said. He said thousands of people may be affected in the nine Western states covered by the circuit court.

The new law makes noncitizens automatically deportable for a variety of crimes, including virtually all drug crimes, and says they cannot appeal those deportation orders in federal court. The law also says they are ineligible for waivers of deportation.

The appeals court ruled, however, that the law did not eliminate another route to federal court: habeas corpus, which allows residents to seek release from unconstitutional detention.