The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government can detain immigrants with past criminal records even after they have completed their prison terms, issuing a narrow verdict that sided with the Trump Administration’s pursuit of hardline immigration policies. The 5-4 decision was led by the court’s conservative justices and dissented by its liberal wing. The ruling reverses a determination by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which stated that migrants can only be put in immigration detention within 24 hours of their release from criminal custody, as opposed to months, or even years later. The case’s lead plaintiff, Cambodian refugee Mony Preap, was a legal permanent resident with two drug convictions. He was detained, and faced possible removal proceedings in 2013, years after being released from criminal custody, according to the court document. The conservative justices argued that the earlier ruling “spare[s] terrorist aliens from the rigors of mandatory detention” and would be “gentler on terrorists than it is on garden-variety offenders.” Justice Samuel Alito said the fact that “the alien must be arrested on the day he walks out of jail” is “especially hard to swallow.” This “unsparing deadline” will often “be missed for reasons beyond the Federal Government’s control,” he said, adding that the majority ruling was to ensure homeland security officials would not be constrained. Justice Stephen Breyer of the court’s dissenting liberal wing asserted the ruling could prevent bail hearings for immigrants with even minor criminal records. This could cause “serious harm to the principles for which American law has long stood.” “[The immigrants] may have established families and put down roots in a community,” Breyer said. “These aliens may then be detained for months, sometimes years, without the possibility of release.” Tuesday’s ruling hands a victory to the Trump Administration, which last week sought tougher immigration policies. Last September, the administration proposed a rule that would make immigrants who use public benefits ineligible for green cards or to get admitted to the U.S. Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Hillary Leung at hillary.leung@time.com.<doc-sep>A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday bolstered the Trump administration’s power to arrest and indefinitely jail legal immigrants who committed past crimes that could trigger deportation, including those who completed their sentences years ago or were convicted of minor drug offenses. The court’s five conservatives pointed to a “mandatory detention” rule in a 1996 immigration law that said federal agents “shall take into custody” immigrants who have been convicted of certain crimes that would lead to deportation. Tuesday’s high court decision is the third in the last two years that strengthens Trump’s authority under the immigration laws. While the ruling interprets a 1996 law, it takes on added significance because the administration has been more aggressive in arresting and jailing immigrants. The justices in the majority said Congress feared it would be “too risky” to let terrorists or dangerous criminals go free while deportation was pending. But their opinion conceded the law is so broad it also sweeps in nonviolent “drug offenders and tax cheats.” Advertisement The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acting on an American Civil Liberties Union class-action suit in California, ruled in 2016 that these immigrants were not subject to mandatory detention if they were not “promptly” taken into custody after their release from a local jail or state prison. This spared those who had lived and worked legally in California, some for over a decade. But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., speaking for the 5-4 majority, called this argument “hard to swallow” since local officials in so-called sanctuary cities do not alert federal agents when an immigrant is released. In the case, Nielsen vs. Preap, he said the law calls for mandatory detention of the immigrants without exception and regardless of when they are taken into custody. Last June, a 5-4 majority upheld the travel ban and said the president could deny entry to immigrants and visitors from several Muslim-majority nations. A few months earlier, the court ruled the government could hold immigrants for months or years without offering them a bail hearing. That decision, in Jennings vs. Rodriquez, was an offshoot of the case decided Tuesday. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, speaking for the court’s four liberals, read his dissent in the courtroom. “The greater importance of the case lies in the power that the majority’s interpretation grants to the government. It is a power to detain persons who committed a minor crime many years before,” he said. “And it is a power to hold those persons, perhaps for many months, without any opportunity to obtain bail.” He said the Constitution gave all people the right to a hearing if they were held by the government. “I would have thought that Congress intended to adhere to these values and did not intend to allow the government to apprehend persons years after their release from prison and hold them indefinitely without a bail hearing,” Breyer said. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed. Joining Alito in the majority were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh. In a separate opinion, Thomas and Gorsuch said they would have thrown out the suit on the grounds the courts have no authority to review class-action suits challenging immigration enforcement. ACLU Deputy Legal Director Cecillia Wang, who argued the case, criticized the ruling. “For two terms in a row now, the Supreme Court has endorsed the most extreme interpretation of immigration detention statutes,” she said, “allowing mass incarceration of people without any hearing, simply because they are defending themselves against a deportation charge. We will continue to fight the gross overuse of detention in the immigration system.” Advertisement Eduardo Padilla, one of the named plaintiffs, came to the United States in 1966 as an infant and became a lawful permanent resident in the Sacramento area. He has five children and six grandchildren, all of whom are U.S. citizens. Padilla had two convictions for drug possession, in 1997 and 1999, and served 90 days in jail in 2002 for having an unloaded pistol in a shed. In 2013, federal agents rearrested him over those crimes and held him for deportation. But he went free after the 9th Circuit ruled the “mandatory detention” provision did not apply to immigrants such as Padilla. He was released on a $1,500 bond because a judge decided he did not present a danger and was not likely to flee. The lead plaintiff in the case, Mony Preap, came from Cambodia as a child and had been a lawful U.S. resident since 1981. He was taken into custody over two convictions for possessing marijuana in 2006, but an immigration judge later canceled his deportation and he was released. The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento welcomed the ruling. Kent Scheidegger, its legal director, said “the 9th Circuit’s ruling had misinterpreted the law in order to allow alien criminals in sanctuary cities to avoid detention and deportation under federal law. Congress required mandatory detention for those convicted of aggravated felonies for good reason.” Advertisement The high court heard arguments on the case in mid-October, the same week that Kavanaugh took his seat. He spoke up in defense of the Trump administration’s view that the law was intended to authorize federal agents to arrest and hold immigrants with crimes on their records regardless of when they were released. He questioned whether “we should be putting in a time limit” on taking immigrants into custody. In a short concurring opinion on Tuesday, Kavanaugh said the issue before the court was “narrow.” It did not involve who will be deported or how long they will be held. “It would be odd, in my view,” he added, to read the law as exempting certain noncitizens from mandatory detention simply because the government “failed to immediately detain them upon their release.” The latest from Washington » More stories from David G. Savage »<doc-sep>The Supreme Court on Tuesday handed the Trump administration a victory in its battle to clamp down on illegal immigration by making it easier to detain immigrants with criminal records. The ruling that federal immigration authorities can detain immigrants awaiting deportation anytime after they have been released from prison on criminal charges represents a victory for President Trump. In the case before the justices, a group of mostly green card holders argued that unless immigrants were picked up immediately after finishing their prison sentence, they should get a hearing to argue for their release while deportation proceedings go forward. But in the 5-4 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled against them, deciding that federal immigration officials can detain noncitizens at any time after their release from local or state custody. The court also ruled the government maintains broad discretion to decide who would represent a danger to the community in deciding who to release or detain. BORDER PATROL UNION LEADER: CONGRESS IS WRONG, NATIONAL EMERGENCY ON THE BORDER IS REAL During oral arguments in October the Trump administration argued that given the limited money and manpower available, it was nearly impossible for the federal government to immediately detain every immigrant upon their release from custody. Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, stating that "neither the statute's text nor its structure" supported the immigrants' argument. The court's conservative justices sided with the Trump administration, which argued as the Obama administration did, against hearings for those convicted of crimes and affected by the law. The case before the justices involved a class-action lawsuit brought by non-citizens in California and a similar class-action lawsuit brought in the state of Washington. One of the lead plaintiffs, Mony Preap, has been a lawful permanent resident of the United States since 1981 and has two convictions for possession of marijuana. He was released from prison in 2006 but was not taken into immigration custody until 2013. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Preap won in lower courts, and the government was ordered to provide him and other class members a bond hearing. Preap has since won his deportation case. The ruling was the first in the court’s current term – which began in October – and the first for Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who, along with Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote a concurring opinion. The court’s four more liberal justices dissented, and Justice Stephen Breyer took the unusual step of reading an oral dissent from the bench. Fox News’ William Mears and the Associated Press contributed to this report.<doc-sep>It is profoundly wrong to believe that, just because the president* is a vulgar talking yam, his policies are not succeeding in several important places. (Most of these policies, it should be noted, differ only in how crude they are from policies that would have been pursued by most Republican presidential candidates.) For example, on Tuesday, by the now-customary 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court handed a big victory to the administration* not only in Nielsen v. Preap, the case under consideration, but also to the administration*'s excessive hostility toward immigrant populations. From the AP: The issue in the case before the justices had to do with the detention of noncitizens who have committed a broad range of crimes that make them deportable. Immigration law tells the government it must arrest those people when they are released from custody and then hold them while an immigration court decides whether they should be deported. But those affected by the law aren’t always picked up immediately and are sometimes not detained until years later. In the case before the Supreme Court, a group of mostly green card holders argued that unless they’re picked up essentially within a day of being released, they should be entitled to a hearing where they can argue that they aren’t a danger to the community and are not likely to flee. If a judge were to agree, they would not have to remain in custody while their deportation case goes forward. That’s the same hearing rule that applies to other noncitizens the government is trying to deport. But the Supreme Court disagreed with the immigrants’ interpretation of federal law in a 5-4 ruling that divided the court along ideological lines. Looking at a statutory provision enacted by Congress in 1996, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “neither the statute’s text nor its structure” supported the immigrants’ argument. The court’s conservative justices sided with the Trump administration. In other words, if you did a two-year bid 30 years ago for whatever, and you've been the choir director in a Trappist monastery since you got out of stir, ICE can now grab you up and detain you, theoretically, for the rest of your life. The Supreme Court just dropped its imprimatur on indefinite detention. (The plaintiff here was a guy who was busted twice for weed, did his time, and was released in 2006. Seven years later, ICE picked him up and locked him away. Since then, he won his deportation case and is still in this country.) John Moore Getty Images During the Court's last term, Justice Stephen Breyer, who took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench on Tuesday, warned us that the conservative majority was warming up to remove any semblance of constitutional protections from immigrants. Dissenting in a case called Jennings v. Rodriguez, Breyer wrote: Whatever the fiction, would the Constitution leave the government free to starve, beat, or lash those held within our boundaries? If not, then, whatever the fiction, how can the Constitution authorize the government to imprison arbitrarily those who, whatever we might pretend, are in reality right here in the United States? The answer is that the Constitution does not authorize arbitrary detention. And the reason that is so is simple: Freedom from arbitrary detention is as ancient and important a right as any found within the Constitution’s boundaries. In his dissent on Tuesday, Breyer somehow resisted the temptation to say he told us so but, he did tell us so. That is because we cannot interpret the words of this specific statute without also considering basic promises that America’s legal system has long made to all persons. In deciphering the intent of the Congress that wrote this statute, we must decide—in the face of what is, at worst, linguistic ambiguity—whether Congress intended that persons who have long since paid their debt to society would be deprived of their liberty for months or years without the possibility of bail. We cannot decide that question without bearing in mind basic American legal values: the Government’s duty not to deprive any “person” of “liberty” without “due process of law,”; the Nation’s original commitment to protect the “unalienable” right to “Liberty”; and, less abstractly and more directly, the longstanding right of virtually all persons to receive a bail hearing. I would have thought that Congress meant to adhere to these values and did not intend to allow the Government to apprehend persons years after their release from prison and hold them indefinitely without a bail hearing. We will have los desaparecidos in this country. We are on our way toward that. We probably have them now. Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here. Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Tuesday endorsed the U.S. government’s authority to detain immigrants awaiting deportation anytime - potentially even years - after they have completed prison terms for criminal convictions, handing President Donald Trump a victory as he pursues hardline immigration policies. FILE PHOTO: The Supreme Court is seen in Washington, U.S., May 14, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts The court ruled 5-4 along ideological lines, with its conservative justices in the majority and its liberal justices dissenting, that federal authorities could place such immigrants into indefinite detention anytime without the possibility of bail, not just immediately after they finish prison sentences. The ruling, authored by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, left open the possibility that some immigrants could challenge their detention. These immigrants potentially could argue that the use of the 1996 federal law involved in the case, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, against them long after finishing their sentences would violate their due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. Most of the plaintiffs in the case are legal immigrants. The law states the government can detain convicted immigrants “when the alien is released” from criminal detention. Civil rights lawyers in the case argued that the language of the law shows that it applies only immediately after immigrants are released. The Trump administration said the government should have the power to detain such immigrants anytime. In dissent, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said the ruling raises serious due process questions. “It runs the gravest risk of depriving those whom the government has detained of one of the oldest and most important of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms,” Breyer wrote. But Alito wrote that it is not the court’s job to impose a time limit for when immigrants can be detained after serving a prison sentence. Alito noted that the court has previously said that “an official’s crucial duties are better carried out late than never.” Alito said the challengers’ assertion that immigrants had to be detained within 24 hours of ending a prison sentence is “especially hard to swallow.” It marked Trump’s latest immigration victory at the court. The conservative justices also were in the majority in June 2018 when the court upheld on a 5-4 vote Trump’s travel ban targeting people from several Muslim-majority countries. Tuesday’s decision follows a February 2018 ruling in a similar case in which the conservative majority, over liberal dissent, curbed the ability of immigrants held in long-term detention during deportation proceedings to argue for release. ‘MOST EXTREME INTERPRETATION’ American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Cecilia Wang, who argued the newly decided case for the challengers, said that in both rulings “the Supreme Court has endorsed the most extreme interpretation of immigration detention statutes, allowing mass incarceration of people without any hearing, simply because they are defending themselves against a deportation charge.” Wang said the ACLU is “looking into follow-up litigation along various avenues.” Trump has backed limits on legal and illegal immigrants since taking office in January 2017. Kerri Kupec, a U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman, said administration officials were pleased with the ruling. The case’s plaintiffs included two legal U.S. residents involved in separate lawsuits filed in 2013, a Cambodian immigrant named Mony Preap convicted of marijuana possession and a Palestinian immigrant named Bassam Yusuf Khoury convicted of attempting to manufacture a controlled substance. In the two detention case rulings, the Supreme Court reversed the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a liberal leaning court with jurisdiction over a large part of the western United States that Trump has frequently criticized. In both cases, litigation against the federal government started before Trump took office. In the latest case, the administration had appealed a 2016 9th Circuit ruling that favored immigrants, a decision it said would undermine the government’s ability to deport immigrants who have committed crimes. The 9th Circuit had ruled that convicted immigrants who are not immediately detained by immigration authorities after finishing their sentences but then later picked up by immigration authorities could seek bond hearings to argue for their release. Other regional federal appeals courts that have addressed the issue did not rule the same way as the 9th Circuit and were more in line with the Supreme Court’s ruling. That means immigrants in those regions who were subject to mandatory detention already were not entitled to bond hearings. Under federal immigration law, immigrants convicted of certain offenses are subject to mandatory detention during their deportation process.