Convicted non-citizens can be held
Detaining legal immigrants splits high court

Anne Gearan
Associated Press
Apr. 30, 2003 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - The government may jail legal immigrants who have committed serious crimes to ensure they do not flee or commit new crimes while awaiting deportation hearings, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

The 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist applies to non-citizens who have served their sentences. More than 75,000 such people have been ordered jailed without bail since the law allowing such detentions took effect in 1996.

Thousands of legal permanent residents are out on bail while they await deportation or try to fight it, a process that can take months or years. Federal appeals courts covering California and more than a dozen other states had been allowing bail in some cases despite the 1996 law, and most of those immigrants could be brought back to jail under Tuesday's ruling.

The ruling was a victory for the Bush administration, which also is claiming latitude to jail immigrants and others possibly linked to terrorism and to close deportation immigration hearings for others swept up after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Lawyers disagreed whether the case is a harbinger of the court's views on post-Sept. 11 civil liberties challenges, although it raised some of the same questions about who may be detained and for how long.

"It's very disappointing, and what it means is that large numbers of legal, permanent residents are going to be detained (for months or longer)," said Judy Rabinovitz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Rabinovitz represented Hyung Joon Kim, who came to the United States from South Korea when he was 6. At 18 he was arrested for breaking into a tool shed and sent to prison in California for burglary and petty theft.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco sided with Kim, ruling his constitutional rights were violated when he was denied bail.

Rehnquist said there is a compelling reason to lock up people like Kim.

"Congress, justifiably concerned that deportable criminal aliens who are not detained continue to engage in crime and fail to appear for their removal hearings in large numbers, may require that persons such as (Kim) be detained for the brief period necessary for their removal proceedings," he wrote.

Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined Rehnquist.

In a dissent, Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued Kim is a legal U.S. resident with more rights than an illegal immigrant.

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