Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, on Thursday, joined the liberal wing of the Supreme Court to rule against the federal government in an immigration case.
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The case, Niz-Chavez v. Garland, concerned a technical question about how the government sends deportation notices to nonresidents who have been living in the United States. The court held that the government must send a single notice in order to trigger the “stop-time rule,” a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that ends a nonresident’s claims on a “continuous stay” in the country. The federal government, up to that point, had sent multiple forms giving piecemeal information about nonresidents’ deportation hearings.
Gorsuch, in his majority opinion, wrote that the court’s ruling hinged on the fact that Congress, in adopting the act, wrote that the federal government must send nonresidents “a notice.”
“To trigger the stop-time rule, the government must serve ‘a’ notice containing all the information Congress has specified,” Gorsuch wrote. “To an ordinary reader — both in 1996 and today — ‘a’ notice would seem to suggest just that: ‘a’ single document containing the required information, not a mishmash of pieces with some assembly required.”
Gorsuch, pointing to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent, agreed that the court’s decision had, on the whole, come down to a disagreement over how “a” should be read in the 1996 act.
“Admittedly, a lot here turns on a small word. In the view of some, too much,” he wrote, adding, “But that’s not how the law is written, and the dissent never explains what authority might allow us to undertake the statutory rearranging it advocates.”
On the whole, Gorsuch wrote, the court’s decision will make it easier for nonresidents to respond to the federal government when the latter attempts to deport them.
“When the federal government seeks a procedural advantage against an individual, it will at least supply him with a single and reasonably comprehensive statement of the nature of the proceedings against him,” Gorsuch wrote. “If men must turn square corners when they deal with the government, it cannot be too much to expect the government to turn square corners when it deals with them.”
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Kavanaugh, in his dissent, wrote that to him, Gorsuch’s reasoning was “rather perplexing as a matter of statutory interpretation and common sense.” Kavanaugh noted that the man in question in the case, Agusto Niz-Chavez, admitted that he was subject to removal because he entered the country unlawfully. And yet, Kavanaugh added, the court’s ruling will now give him another shot at remaining because of a technicality.
Kavanaugh concluded that the court’s decision will bring “serious administrative burdens on an immigration system that is already overburdened, thereby harming other noncitizens.” The case marks the first time this term that Kavanaugh has not voted with the majority.
