WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court took up two cases Friday in an effort to resolve disagreement among the lower courts on notice requirements for when individuals are summoned before a federal judge on illegal immigration charges.
One of the cases stems from an October ruling by the Ninth Circuit, which held that a "Notice to Appear" sent to a noncitizen must consist of a single document specifying the time and date of their removal proceedings. The decision invalidated a 19-year-old removal order for Varinder Singh, who entered the U.S. illegally in 2016 from India. Singh did receive multiple hearings notices that mentioned the date and time, but critically the notice to appear document he received omitted that information.
The Supreme Court set the standard for notices to appear in the 2021 case Niz-Chavez v. Garland.
Per their custom, the justices did not issue any comment in taking up Singh's case, which they consolidated for oral argument with similar one out of the Fifth Circuit.
Moris Esmelis Campos-Chaves, a citizen of El Salvador who illegally entered Texas in 2005, argues that his notice to appear did not contain the date and time of his removal proceedings. An appeals court ruled against him, however, based on his subsequent receipt of a notice of hearing that contained the information.
Removal proceedings generally require two steps. First, the Department of Homeland Security must serve the immigrant with a notice to appear that announces the individual's removability from the U.S. and schedules a date and location for a hearing in immigration court. Next, the department must file the notice with the immigration court that will conduct the hearing.
Immigration court judges nevertheless dismissed 63,500 cases last year because the department did not file the notices to appear with the court.
The number of cases dropped for this reason skyrocketed after Border Patrol agents received access to a court network that allowed them to directly schedule the initial hearings with immigration judges. While this process was intended to make the process of entering new cases more efficient, the resulting disconnect between the agents and the court has brought thousands of immigrants and their attorneys to courthouses where a judge has no choice but to drop their case.
U.S. immigrant courts are already facing an extreme backlog of cases that reached 2.1 million cases in January — up from about 600,000 in 2017.
Border Patrol still processes about 25,000 individuals a month for immigration hearings. Agents say this work can take over an hour per immigrant.
In addition to the consolidated cases, the justices agreed Friday to hear a deportation challenge by Situ Wilkinson, who lives in the United States with an 8-year-old, U.S. citizen son.
Wilkinson claims that he should not be removed to his homeland of Trinidad and Tobago because police in his native town have threatened to kill him.
A Third Circuit panel dismissed Wilkinson's petition, however, after concluding that he does not face persecution for membership in a particular social group.
The Supreme Court took summer hiatus Friday afternoon and will resume hearing arguments again in October.
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