Latest US SC decision on immigration

Last week, the US Supreme Court issued a decision on immigration that upholds the Biden's administration policy on setting guidelines on whom immigration authorities can enforce arrest and deportation. It must be recalled that in 2021, the US Department of Homeland Security laid out guidelines in which the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can effectively carry out its duties given its limited resources targeting only those undocumented immigrants who pose a threat to national security, public safety, or border security. In effect, the government has set priorities as to who they can arrest as ICE does not have enough manpower and capability to arrest all the nearly 12 million undocumented aliens. Being simply an undocumented immigrant in the US is not in itself enough basis for deportation. This policy was challenged by the states of Texas and Louisiana but the US Supreme Court ruled that these states do not have standing to sue and challenge these guidelines. As it stands now, the Biden administration has the legal authority to enforce and exercise these guidelines in what is largely an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

This latest Supreme Court ruling is a welcome relief for the undocumented immigrants. As long as you are not a threat to public safety or national security, you can be assured that you are way down the list of being arrested. Of course, there is still a chance that you can still be detained but you are not an enforcement priority. However, this decision could still be revisited in the future. Given the right set of facts, there will still be states that will seek to reverse this decision. Or a new administration might reverse this policy altogether. So the lesson here is that undocumented immigrants must not be complacent. Immigration laws and policies change so often and depends largely on the priorities of the ruling administration.

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In another immigration case decided by the US Supreme Court, it upheld a federal law that makes a crime of encouraging illegal immigration as being not violative of the constitutional right to free speech. This case stems from a conviction of a certain Helama Hansen in California for defrauding hundreds of non-citizens by promising them an entry to citizenship through adult adoption. Such pathway does not exist. Hansen appealed his conviction on the ground that the law is overly broad. The lower district court rejected his argument but was overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And the US Supreme Court dismissed the rationale of his appeal noting that the law only forbids the intentional solicitation or facilitation of certain unlawful acts. It does not prohibit a substantial amount of protected speech.