Dissenters Sotomayor and Jackson Miss the Mark on SCOTUS Immigration Ruling
The odds against a successful impeachment trial of a Supreme Court justice are so long as to be statistically impossible. First, the House of Representatives must bring impeachment articles that can be passed by a simple majority. A Senate trial would follow, requiring a two-thirds majority, a tough hurdle. In the nation’s history, only once, in 1805, was a Supreme Court justice impeached. The House impeached Samuel Chase, a Founding Father, and Declaration of Independence signatory, who stood accused of refusing to dismiss biased jurors and of excluding and limiting defense witnesses in political cases. A year later, the Senate voted to acquit Chase on all counts. He remained on the Supreme Court until his death in 1811.
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson deserve impeachment consideration, although such action remains unlikely. Their problematic Supreme Court votes have consistently favored illegal aliens over U.S. citizens’ rights.
The recent case provides context: In a brief unsigned order, SCOTUS paused a Massachusetts federal judge’s ruling. Obama appointee U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston sided with illegal aliens who were previously admitted as part of the Biden administration’s legally dubious parole program. The SCOTUS ruling was a significant victory for enforcement advocates. The most remarkable element of the 7-2 ruling was the dissent by Sotomayor and Brown Jackson, which demonstrated not only pro-illegal alien and anti-American biases but also revealed limited understanding of immigration law, specifically “parole.”
Work authorizations were granted under the Biden administration improperly implemented humanitarian parole policies that mainly benefited Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, as well as some Afghans and Ukrainians. Parole, when granted legally, is awarded on a case-by-case basis and valid only for extremely short periods. Parole is not a legal status under immigration law. The statute authorizing parole clearly states that receiving parole does not constitute legal admission to the United States. Parole is merely a legal device that allows the government to admit otherwise inadmissible aliens into the country on a temporary, case-by-case basis for a significant public benefit or urgent humanitarian need. Admitting 500,000+ illegal aliens does not satisfy the “significant public benefit or urgent humanitarian need” condition.
The Biden administration, however, granted parole en masse to hundreds of thousands of mostly unvetted illegal aliens. Moreover, parole status can be revoked at any time, and parolees who haven’t obtained a visa or who are otherwise shielded from deportation are subject to removal once the federal government terminates their parole. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland knew that the CHNV parole program violated immigration laws but did not intervene.
Advocates for CHNVs said that in Noem v. Doe the federal government sought permission, through an emergency docket, “to execute the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history.” All parolees, they stressed, had “followed the law and were individually approved to enter the United States on a case-by-case basis”—a patently misleading statement, if not a blatant lie. At most, the paroled illegal aliens underwent a cursory CBP interview at the border and may have presented falsified documents that Mayorkas ordered his agents to accept.
Explaining her convoluted reasoning in dissent, Jackson relied on emotion while excluding facts. Parole termination is not judicially reviewable and is lawful. Jackson, with Sotomayor concurring, wrote that her colleagues had “plainly botched” their ruling and cited the “devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens [illegal aliens] while their legal claims are pending.” Furthermore, Jackson continued, the noncitizens [illegal aliens] at the center of this dispute face “significant problems” that “far exceed” any injury to the government.
“Devastating consequences” and “significant problems” related to returning home were not and never should have been legal considerations in the SCOTUS ruling that allowed the Trump administration to deport CHNV aliens. Removals can present challenges for the departing aliens, but the question SCOTUS addressed was not whether deportation would be inconvenient for illegal immigrants but whether DHS could legally remove them. Only activist justices Sotomayor and Jackson disagreed.
DHS issued a statement that read, in part, “Ending the CHNV parole programs, as well as the paroles of those who exploited it, will be a necessary return to common-sense policies, a return to public safety, and a return to America First.”
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