The Supreme Court on Thursday made it easier for the federal government to deport legal immigrants who are convicted of certain crimes, with liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joining the majority in the 6-3 decision.
In an opinion authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the justices ruled in the case Pugin v. Garland that convictions for both accessory after the fact and attempting to dissuade victims from reporting sexual misconduct are crimes serious enough to make a person eligible for permanent removal.
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Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case said that obstruction of justice requires there to be an open investigation, but Kavanaugh and the other five justices said that is not the case.
“Individuals can obstruct the process of justice even when an investigation or proceeding is not pending,” Kavanaugh wrote. “For example, a murderer may threaten to kill a witness if the witness reports information to the police. Such an act is no less obstructive merely because the government has yet to catch on and begin an investigation.”
Jackson, an appointee of President Joe Biden, found herself for the first time joining five Republican-appointed justices in opposition to her two liberal colleagues. Justice Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, joined liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent, with Elena Kagan dissenting in part, creating a 6-3 opinion that wasn't split across ideological lines.
"I agree with the Court that the Ninth Circuit wrongly embraced a pending-proceeding requirement when it assessed what types of prior offenses qualify as 'offense[s] relating to obstruction of justice' under 8 U. S. C. §1101(a)(43)(S), for purposes of determining the 'aggravated felon[ies]' that render noncitizens deportable, §1227(a)(2)(A)(iii)," Jackson wrote in a 4-page concurrence.
The decision surrounds two longtime lawful permanent residents ordered to be deported following their convictions. One was Jean Francois Pugin, a citizen of Mauritius who was in the U.S. as a legal permanent resident but later received a felony conviction for accessory after the fact.
The other case involved Fernando Cordero-Garcia, a Mexican citizen who has lived in the U.S. as a legal permanent resident since 1965 and worked as a government psychologist. He sexually assaulted several of his patients and threatened them into silence, making claims he could have them committed or take their children if they didn't submit to him.
Cordero-Garcia was convicted of witness tampering and other crimes, which the government said qualified as an obstruction of justice.
Sotomayor's dissent argued that interference with an ongoing investigation or proceeding is key to an offense relating to obstruction of justice.
“The Court’s broad interpretation of ‘obstruction of justice,’ which swallows up all witness tampering, cannot be reconciled with this statutory text,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court circumvents this ample evidence only by casting a wide net and then throwing back all but the bycatch."
In a separate immigration case released last month known as Santos-Zacaria v. Garland, Jackson scored unanimous support among the justices in her majority decision that sided with a transgender immigrant facing deportation.
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The majority ruled in that decision that a requirement for noncitizens challenging their deportation to first exhaust all administrative remedies is not jurisdictional, allowing Leon Santos-Zacaria, 33, who is transgender and goes by Estrella, to appeal deportation from the United States.
Jackson, the newest member of the high court and the first former public defender to serve on the bench, has written six opinions so far during her first term as the justices race to finish 14 more decisions ahead of their summer break.