Press Release
Press Release
Press Contacts: Erik Cummins, Matt Hyams, Olivia Thomas
11.25.20
A team of Pillsbury attorneys worked pro bono to file an amicus brief in a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on the question of whether undocumented immigrants who are in withholding-only proceedings can be detained for the entire time their case is pending without being allowed to seek release at an individualized bond hearing. The brief was filed by Pillsbury on behalf of a coalition of former United States Immigration Judges and members of the Board of Immigration Appeals in Pham v. Chavez. This is the third amicus brief that Pillsbury has filed for these clients in Supreme Court immigration cases over the past two years.
The brief provides the Supreme Court with a practical understanding of how immigration courts work, and how the government’s interpretation of the statutory provisions at issue would affect the operations of those courts, by judges who have collectively presided over thousands of immigration cases and appeals, according to Matthew Putorti, a counsel at Pillsbury who worked on the brief.
The brief contends that detaining noncitizens without the opportunity for release on bond “will lead to inefficiency in the administration of cases, and will deprive immigration judges of the ability to exercise discretion on one of the very issues on which they are expert: whether a detained noncitizen in withholding-only proceedings should be released following an individualized bond hearing.”
The case, which the Supreme Court is poised to hear this term, was brought by a group of immigrants from Honduras and El Salvador who were deported from the United States and then reentered and asserted fear of persecution or torture if returned to their home countries. Upon their reentry, the government detained them, and their previous removal orders were reinstated.
The government has argued that the noncitizens’ reinstated removal orders trigger a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that requires detention while the case is pending. The noncitizens have said that that section of the law requiring detention applies only once the government is authorized to remove the noncitizen, which is not so while their cases are pending and their claims of persecution or torture are being evaluated.
“Bond hearings in withholding of removal proceedings are no different than bond hearings in other contexts,” the coalition’s brief argued. “Contrary to [the government’s] assertion, bond hearings in withholding of removal proceedings neither lead to a slowdown of cases that ‘thwart Congress’ objectives’ in enacting the immigration laws, nor impose an administrative burden on immigration courts.”
The coalition of former judges and BIA members is represented by David Keyko, Robert Sills, Matthew Putorti, Daryl Kleiman, Patricia Rothenberg and Roland Reimers of Pillsbury.