Ruling throws cases into confusion

Immigration courts battling chaos caused by inadequate notices

LOS ANGELES — Immigration courts from Boston to Los Angeles have been experiencing fallout from a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that has caused some deportation orders to be tossed and cases thrown out, bringing more chaos to a system already besieged by ballooning dockets and lengthy backlogs.

The little-known ruling addressed how to properly provide notices to immigrants to appear in court for deportation proceedings. But it is having broader implications in immigration courts in charge of deciding whether hundreds of thousands of people should be allowed to stay in the United States.

Since the decision was issued in June, immigration attorneys have been asking judges to throw out their clients’ cases. Some judges have refused to issue deportation orders for immigrants. And in a recent case in Washington state, a Mexican farmworker had an indictment for illegally reentering the country tossed out.

It isn’t clear how many people’s immigration cases could be affected. Some immigration judges have denied attorneys’ requests, but others have granted them.

“The potential consequences of the decision are massive,” said Jeremy McKinney, an immigration attorney in Greensboro, N.C.

The Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision focused on the case of a Brazilian handyman seeking to apply for a special green card given to immigrants who have been in the country at least 10 years, have good moral character and whose American relatives would suffer if they were deported.

Wescley Pereira came to the U.S. on a tourist visa from Brazil in 2000 and settled in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where he has two American-born children. In 2006, Pereira was arrested for operating a vehicle under the influence and given a notice to appear in immigration court, but it didn’t include specifics about his hearing. More than a year later, a mailer with that information was sent to him, but got returned as undeliverable, and an immigration judge ordered him deported when he didn’t show up.

Pereira was pulled over in 2013 for driving without headlights on and, with the deportation order on his record, immigration authorities detained him.

By then, he had lived in the country long enough to seek a green card. But the U.S. government said Pereira could only count the time before he received the notice toward his green card aspirations.

The Supreme Court disagreed, saying a notice that doesn’t list the time and place of a hearing isn’t a notice under the law, and that Pereira was building up time in the country toward his application all the while. Without listing time and place, “the Government cannot reasonably expect the noncitizen to appear for his removal proceedings,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the majority decision.

Since the ruling, immigration lawyers have been arguing that the undated notices their clients received in recent years aren’t valid. In some cases, they’re asking for deportation cases to be thrown out entirely and, in others, for a deportation order to be wiped from immigrants’ records so they can get another chance to argue they should be allowed to remain in the country.