Justices Add New Hurdle for Immigrants Fearing a Return Home (1)

The US Supreme Court made it harder for immigrants to challenge a determination that they won’t be killed or tortured if returned to their home country.

The court’s 5-4 ruling on Thursday said the time to appeal begins to run when someone is ordered removed, not when a determination is made about where they can be deported to. Known as “withholding-only” relief, that determination about where an individual can be deported typically happens much later.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, acknowledged that there are “legitimate practical concerns” in requiring individuals to appeal their withholding-only determination before it’s complete. But “we must nevertheless follow the statutory text and our prior precedents,” Alito wrote.

Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court’s ruling was “well into the heartland of illogic and absurdity.” She was joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Neil Gorsuch.

The case centers on Pierre Riley, who overstayed a tourist visa and has lived in the US for decades. He says he’s likely to be murdered if returned to Jamaica.

Although the justices split on when an individual must appeal, the court was unanimous that the deadline was flexible enough to allow courts to waive it to consider equitable and fairness concerns.

It’s part of a broader trend of reading statutory bars forgivingly and seeking to sort so-called jurisdictional rules from “claims processing” ones. The deadlines in this case fell into the latter category.

The court’s “pattern of recent decisions shows that we will not categorize a provision as ‘jurisdictional’ unless the signal is exceedingly strong,” Alito wrote.

During arguments in March, some of the justices lamented that cases aiming to clarify jurisdictional from claims processing rules has come to dominate the court’s docket.

The case is Riley v. Bondi, U.S., No. 23-1270.