Partner Mark Fleming, Counsel Charles Bridge and Associates Tobi Kuehne and Victoria Moreno analyze the Supreme Court’s opinion in Santos-Zacaria v. Garland in an article published by Bloomberg Law.
Excerpt: When it comes to statutory interpretation at the US Supreme Court, text is often center stage with practical concerns relegated to the background. Justice Antonin Scalia once said text is “the only thing that is relevant to [a] decision” and that “whether an outcome is desirable” has no bearing on the interpretive process.
But last week in Santos-Zacaria v. Garland, practical considerations snagged some of the spotlight as the court unanimously rejected the government’s effort to require noncitizens to petition the Board of Immigration Appeals for reconsideration of newly introduced errors before seeking review in federal courts of appeals. The decision emerged as immigration case backlogs have continued to worsen over the years.
Santos-Zacaria addressed two independent but related questions regarding 8 U.S.C. §1252(d)(1), which requires that noncitizens “exhaust[ ] all administrative remedies available...as of right” before challenging a BIA removal order in federal court. First, is Section 1252(d)(1) jurisdictional? Second, does Section 1252(d)(1) require a noncitizen to assign error to the BIA’s decision in a motion to reconsider before petitioning for review?
