Court backs asylum-seeker removal
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court handed a green light Thursday to the Trump administration in its effort to speed up the removal of people seeking asylum.
The court ruled that asylum-seekers claiming fear of persecution abroad do not have to be given a federal court hearing before quick removal from the United States if they initially fail to prove that claim.
The decision was written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito. Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented.
The case, one of many to come before the high court involving the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, concerned Sri Lankan native Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam. He was arrested 25 yards north of the Mexican border and immediately placed in expedited removal proceedings.
Immigration officials determined that Thuraissigiam did not have a credible fear of persecution, even though he is a member of Sri Lanka’s Tamil ethnic minority that faces beatings and torture at the hands of the government.
“While aliens who have established connections in this country have due process rights in deportation proceedings, the court long ago held that Congress is entitled to set the conditions for an alien’s lawful entry into this country and that, as a result, an alien at the threshold of initial entry cannot claim any greater rights under the Due Process Clause,” Alito wrote.
In her dissent, Sotomayor said the system Congress established short-circuits an inquiry designed to determine whether asylum-seekers “may seek shelter in this country or whether they may be cast to an unknown fate.”
“Today’s decision handcuffs the judiciary’s ability to perform its constitutional duty to safeguard individual liberty and dismantles a critical component of the separation of powers,” she wrote. “It increases the risk of erroneous immigration decisions that contravene governing statutes and treaties.”
The court’s other two liberal justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, agreed with the judgment but said they would have applied it only to Thuraissigiam’s claim.
“Addressing more broadly whether the Suspension Clause protects people challenging removal decisions may raise a host of difficult questions,” Breyer wrote, such as whether the same limit can apply to those picked up years after crossing the border or to those claiming to be U.S. citizens.
During oral arguments in March, Chief Justice John Roberts and other conservatives expressed concern that granting Thuraissigiam a hearing could lead to a significant expansion of new claims.
Only 30 petitions for federal court hearings have been filed so far, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt said then. On Thursday, he lamented that the ruling “fails to live up to the Constitution’s bedrock principle that individuals deprived of their liberty have their day in court, and this includes asylum-seekers.”
But Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler said during oral arguments that close to 100 petitions had been filed.