The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against a Mexican green card holder challenging a deportation order on Monday.
The court’s ruling reversed a previous decision from the California-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. That court had held that Refugio Palomar-Santiago, a Mexican citizen deported for a 1998 DUI, was removed invalidly because of a subsequent Supreme Court decision finding that DUIs were not sufficient cause for removal.
THOMAS, GORSUCH, AND BARRETT JOIN LIBERALS IN IMMIGRATION CASE
The case arose in 2019 when Palomar-Santiago was found to be in the country illegally. He argued, and the 9th Circuit agreed, that his original deportation was not valid. Justice Sonia Sotomayor struck down that notion in the court’s unanimous opinion.
Sotomayor wrote that Palomar-Santiago had not attempted to exhaust all of his other options to reverse the deportation before reentering the country illegally. She chided the 9th Circuit, which the court frequently reverses, for attempting to excuse him from normal procedures.
“When Congress uses ‘mandatory language’ in an administrative exhaustion provision, ‘a court may not excuse a failure to exhaust,'” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet that is what the Ninth Circuit’s rule does.”
During the case’s oral arguments in April, several of the Justices made clear that they were going to side against Palomar-Santiago.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Chief Justice John Roberts said that he was skeptical of the idea that when immigration law changes, the judicial branch should be forced to “unscramble the eggs” on past cases.
“There are a lot of areas where the door closes, and you lose the right to go back and challenge prior determinations,” he said.
