USA TODAY International Edition
Gorsuch joins liberals on deportation law
Ruling says statute is too vague on violent crime
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a law subjecting non-citizens to deportation for crimes of violence is unconstitutionally vague, handing the Trump administration an early defeat — thanks to the vote of Justice Neil Gorsuch.
President Trump’s nominee to the high court joined most of the ruling by the court’s liberal minority, agreeing that the law failed to define what would qualify as a violent crime. He based his conclusion on a similar decision written in 2015 by Justice Antonin Scalia.
Vague laws, Gorsuch wrote, “can invite the exercise of arbitrary power ... by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up. The law before us today is such a law.”
The majority opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, was a victory for James Garcia Dimaya, whose two burglary convictions were considered violent crimes under the statute — despite not having involved violence. It was a defeat for the Justice Department, which defended the law under the Trump and Obama administrations.
“The void-for-vagueness doctrine, as we have called it, guarantees that ordinary people have ‘fair notice’ of the conduct a statute proscribes,” Kagan wrote. “And the doctrine guards against arbitrary or discriminatory law enforcement by insisting that a statute provide standards to govern the actions of police officers, prosecutors, juries and judges.”
The court’s other four conservatives dissented in two separate opinions.
“Today’s holding invalidates a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act ... on which the government relies to ‘ensure that dangerous criminal aliens are removed from the United States,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the court’s decision could lead to “the invalidation of scores of similarly worded state and federal statutes.”
Department of Homeland Security press secretary Tyler Houlton said the ruling “significantly undermines DHS’s efforts to remove aliens convicted of certain violent crimes.”
The case was carried over from the 2016-17 term, after the death of Scalia. With only eight members, the court was unable to render a decision, and the case was rescheduled.
During oral argument in October, Gorsuch wondered how the court could define a crime of violence if Congress did not. “Even when it’s going to put people in prison and deprive them of liberty and result in deportation, we shouldn’t expect Congress to be able to specify those who are captured by its laws?” Gorsuch asked Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler.
Vague laws “can invite the exercise of arbitrary power ... by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up.”
Neil Gorsuch Supreme Court justice