Supreme Court uses deportation squabble to broaden definition of obstruction of justice

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration on Thursday, allowing the government to deport two immigrants for obstruction of justice. 

“Federal law provides that noncitizens convicted of an ‘aggravated felony’ are removable from the United States,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the 6-3 majority. “The definition of ‘aggravated felony’ includes federal or state offenses ‘relating to obstruction of justice.’” 

When an immigrant is convicted of a felony relating to obstruction of justice, the government can trigger removal proceedings using a statute within the Immigration and Nationality Act. In the case at hand, the government is trying to do just that with regard to two immigrants, but a dispute arose over the timing of the obstruction crimes and whether the underlying crimes qualify under the obstruction definition requiring deportation. 

One of the immigrants facing deportation is Fernando Cordero-Garcia who emigrated from Mexico in 1965 and became a lawful permanent resident in the U.S., living in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he worked as a psychologist. The majority of Cordero-Garcia's patients were referred to him through the criminal justice system. 

Cordero-Garcia abused his patients, however, and was convicted in 2011 of sexual battery without restraint and sexual exploitation by a psychotherapist. Before that, however, the psychologist had threatened the patients he abused in an effort to keep them quiet. The same day he was arrested on rape charges in 2007, Cordero-Garcia met with two of his victims in an attempt to dissuade them from reporting. Prosecutors said Cordero-Garcia's efforts to prevent victims from reporting his crimes constituted obstruction of justice and warranted his removal from the country. 

The dispute before the court is how the timing of Cordero-Garcia’s witness interference affects the government’s charges alleging obstruction of justice. The statute within the Immigration and Nationality Act used by the government to conduct these removals has been expanded twice before. The felonies in question at the Supreme Court were addressed in a 1996 expansion that included an offense relating to obstruction of justices. 

Cordero-Garcia prevailed, however, at the Ninth Circuit, finding that the government went too far in its reading of the statute. Urging the justices to affirm the appeals court’s ruling, Cordero-Garcia argued an existing legal process must be present for obstruction of justice to occur. 

His case was consolidated at the Supreme Court along with that of Jean Francois Pugin, a Mauritius native. A legal permanent resident in the U.S. for almost three decades, Pugin is facing deportation for 2015 charges of being an accessory after the fact to a felony in Virginia. Pugin has faced losses at every avenue on appeal, having been denied relief by an immigration judge, the Board of Immigration Appeals and the Fourth Circuit. 

The question in the case was whether an offense could be considered related to obstruction of justice even if an investigation was not ongoing. 

“That question arises because some obstruction offenses can occur when an investigation or proceeding is not pending, such as threatening a witness to prevent the witness from reporting a crime to the police,” Kavanaugh wrote. 

Kavanaugh said when aggravated felonies were defined under the statute in 1996, there was no language requiring an investigation or proceeding to be pending. 

“The dictionaries demonstrate that obstruction of justice includes offenses where an investigation or proceeding is pending, but is not limited to offenses where an investigation or proceeding is pending,” Kavanaugh wrote (emphasis in original). 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, claiming the majority's interpretation cast too broad of a net. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Elena Kagan joined Sotomayor’s opinion. 

“The Court circumvents this ample evidence only by casting a wide net and then throwing back all but the bycatch,” the Obama appointee wrote. “That approach ‘turns the categorical approach on its head,’ and subverts the commonly understood meaning of ‘obstruction of justice’ when Congress enacted §1101(a)(43)(S) in 1996.”  

The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling, nor did attorneys for Pugin and Cordero-Garcia.

Follow @KelseyReichmann

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