Casas-Castrillon v. Lockyer

CourtCourt of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
DecidedJuly 25, 2008
Docket07-56261
StatusPublished

This text of Casas-Castrillon v. Lockyer (Casas-Castrillon v. Lockyer) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Casas-Castrillon v. Lockyer, (9th Cir. 2008).

Opinion

FOR PUBLICATION UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

LUIS FELIPE CASAS-CASTRILLON,  Petitioner-Appellant, No. 07-56261 v. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND  D.C. No. CV-05-01552-BEN SECURITY; BILL LOCKYER, Attorney OPINION General; US ATTORNEY GENERAL, Respondents-Appellees.  Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of California Roger T. Benitez, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted January 7, 2008—Pasadena, California

Filed July 25, 2008

Before: Jerome Farris, Raymond C. Fisher and Milan D. Smith, Jr., Circuit Judges.

Opinion by Judge Fisher

9771 CASAS-CASTRILLON v. HOMELAND SECURITY 9775

COUNSEL

James Fife, Federal Defenders of San Diego, Inc., San Diego, California, for the petitioner-appellant. 9776 CASAS-CASTRILLON v. HOMELAND SECURITY Karen P. Hewitt, United States Attorney; Thomas Stahl and Samuel W. Bettwy, Assistant United States Attorneys, and Thomas Dupree (argued), United States Department of Jus- tice, Washington, D.C., for the respondents-appellees.

Judy Rabinovitz, ACLU Foundation, New York, New York; Cecillia D. Wang, ACLU Foundation, San Francisco, Califor- nia; Ahilan T. Arulanantham and Ranjana Natarajan, ACLU Foundation of Southern California, Los Angeles, California; Jayashri Srikantiah, Stanford Law School Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, Stanford, California; for the amicus curiae ACLU Foundation and ACLU Foundation of Southern California.

Rachael Keast, Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Proj- ect, Florence, Arizona; Nancy Morawetz, Washington Square Legal Services, Inc., New York, New York; for the amicus curiae the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Asian Law Caucus, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, the Cornell Asylum and Con- vention Against Torture Appellate Law Clinic, Hate Free Zone, Human Rights Watch, the International Detention Coalition, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, the National Immigrant Justice Center, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, the New York State Defenders Association Immigrant Defense Project and the U.C. Davis Immigration Law Clinic.

OPINION

FISHER, Circuit Judge:

This appeal concerns whether the government may detain an alien who is a legal permanent resident of the United States CASAS-CASTRILLON v. HOMELAND SECURITY 9777 for seven years without providing him with an adequate opportunity to contest the necessity of his detention before a neutral decision maker. We conclude that a prolonged deten- tion must be accompanied by appropriate procedural safe- guards, including a hearing to establish whether releasing the alien would pose a danger to the community or a flight risk.

Luis Felipe Casas-Castrillon (“Casas”) is a native and citi- zen of Colombia and has been a legal permanent resident of the United States since 1990. He was served with a notice to appear and detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in August 2001, following his release from a state prison for a conviction on an auto burglary charge.1 An immi- gration judge (“IJ”) found that Casas was a removable alien because he had been convicted of two crimes involving moral turpitude. See 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(ii) (providing that “[a]ny alien who . . . is convicted of two or more crimes involving moral turpitude . . . is deportable”).2 Casas appealed this determination to the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”), which affirmed the removal order in July 2002.

From that time until the present, Casas has remained in the continuous custody of the federal government while he has pursued various avenues of relief from removal in the federal district court and the court of appeals, some successful and some not. While he has sought judicial review, his removal has been stayed by court orders for much of the period from 2002 to the present. As of the time that this opinion is filed, Casas is now back before the BIA after this court granted his petition for review of his final order of removal. During this nearly seven-year period of detention, it is unclear what, if 1 On March 1, 2003, the INS was dissolved as an independent agency within the Department of Justice and its functions were transferred to the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security Act of 2002, Pub. L. No. 107-296, § 471, 116 Stat. 2135, 2205. 2 Hereinafter, all citations are to Title 8 of the U.S. Code unless other- wise noted. 9778 CASAS-CASTRILLON v. HOMELAND SECURITY any, opportunity Casas has had to argue to a neutral decision maker that his detention is unnecessary because he does not pose a danger to the community or a flight risk.

Casas filed the instant petition for habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 on August 4, 2005. At that time, his adminis- trative proceedings had been complete for approximately three years, but he was awaiting our court’s review of his timely filed petition for review of his final removal order. In his pro se habeas petition to the district court, Casas argued that his detention had become indefinite and was therefore not authorized by any statute, and that his prolonged detention without a meaningful opportunity to contest the necessity of continued detention violated his right to procedural due pro- cess. The district court denied Casas’ petition on August 15, 2007, and we granted expedited review. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1291 and 2253(a), and we reverse.

I.

As we explained in Prieto-Romero v. Clark, No. 07-35458, slip op. at 9292 (9th Cir. July 25, 2008), Casas’ entitlement to relief turns in part on locating him within the statutory framework of detention authority provided by Sections 236 and 241 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, codified at 8 U.S.C. §§ 1226 and 1231. This is because “[w]here an alien falls within this statutory scheme can affect whether his detention is mandatory or discretionary, as well as the kind of review process available to him if he wishes to contest the necessity of his detention.” Id. Casas and the government vig- orously dispute which statutory provision governs his deten- tion. We conclude that Congress has provided the Attorney General with authority to detain Casas under § 1226(a), which gives the Attorney General a broad grant of discretionary authority to detain an alien “pending a decision on whether the alien is to be removed from the United States.” CASAS-CASTRILLON v. HOMELAND SECURITY 9779 A.

The statutory scheme governing the detention of aliens in removal proceedings is not static; rather, the Attorney Gener- al’s authority over an alien’s detention shifts as the alien moves through different phases of administrative and judicial review. This makes the task of determining where an alien falls within this scheme particularly difficult for a reviewing court, because the Attorney General’s authority over the alien can present a moving target.

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GUERRA
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