The right-wing U.S. Supreme Court issued not one, but two abhorrent decisions on Monday. The first was a win for Ted Cruz, and a case that opens “the floodgates to wantonly bribing politicians,” Daily Kos’ Rebekah Sager writes. His lawsuit “challenged a 2002 campaign finance rule barring politicians from repaying loans to their own campaigns from donations exceeding the federal limit of $250,000 received after Election Day.”
The second decision on Monday was a devastating loss for immigrants. Amy Coney Barrett authored a 5-4 decision ruling against a Georgia man who lawfully entered the U.S. decades ago, but now faces deportation to India after checking the wrong box on a driver’s license form, CNN reports. Neil Gorsuch dissented in the decision, which advocacy organization People For The American Way (PFAW) said “deals a severe blow to immigrant rights.”
PFAW said in a statement received by Daily Kos that right-wing justices ruled immigrants “cannot appeal certain decisions of Immigration authorities in federal court even when they are premised on serious factual errors.” Pankajkumar Patel has lived in the U.S. since 1992 and had a green card application pending when he mistakenly checked a box on the driver’s license form that said he was a U.S. citizen.
While he initially faced a charge of making a false statement, that was dropped. But the federal government continued its effort to deport not only Patel, but also his wife and son also.
Patel fought the deportation, but both an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled against him. Patel “noted there was no reason to intentionally check the wrong box because under Georgia law, he was eligible to receive a license without being a citizen because he had an application seeking lawful permanent residence and a valid employment authorization document,” CNN continued. His appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals was also unsuccessful because it said it didn’t have jurisdiction in the matter.
This paperwork error could now be enough to tear him and several of his family members from their home. But right-wing justices’ decision also represents a direct threat to an untold number of immigrants with legal status.
“In a 5-4 opinion, SCOTUS ruled that no matter how egregious the [immigration judge] had erred, no court has subject matter jurisdiction to review, correct, or undo an administrative decision denying discretionary relief based on error of facts. No matter what,” tweeted immigration attorney Nicolette Glazer.
Gorsuch, who sided with Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, seemed to get it. Broken clock, etc. "On the majority's telling, courts are powerless to correct bureaucratic mistakes like these no matter how grave they may be," Gorsuch wrote in the dissent. "Until today, courts could correct mistakes like these.”
Glazer tweeted that without intervention from the Biden administration, or a private bill from lawmakers, Patel and his family will be “shattered.” Balls And Strikes reported last year how “harsh consequences for mundane mistakes are common in the U.S. immigration system, which almost never extends the benefit of the doubt to those caught within it.”
No grace is extended to immigrants for a mistake when representatives of the federal government fail to follow rules on official forms with no repercussions. Recall when U.S. border agents reportedly listed “Facebook” as migrants’ addresses on government forms critical to their cases. "Some wouldn't have any addresses listed at all,” legal advocates said at the time. This matters because if a court date changes, migrants need to be informed or they could lose their case.
This anti-immigrant court decision is also another example of why Democrats need to ditch the Jim Crow filibuster and expand the court.
“This Supreme Court, dominated by Trump-appointed, far-right justices, is pursuing a scorched-earth campaign against a wide range of our rights and freedoms,” PFAW President Ben Jealous said in the statement. “Today the victims are immigrants to this country, who are being stripped of their right to a day in court to resolve unjust administrative hurdles related to their status. This Court becomes more extreme and dangerous by the day.”