Gorsuch joins liberal justices to end mandatory deportation of immigrants convicted of some crimes

The case, Sessions v. Dimaya, had been closely watched to see if the justices would reveal how they will consider the Trump administration’s overall push to both limit immigration and increase deportations.

As expected after the oral argument, Justice Neil Gorsuch joined with the more liberal justices for the first time since joining the court to produce a 5-4 majority invalidating the federal statute. In doing so, Gorsuch was continuing the jurisprudence of Justice Antonin Scalia, who also sided with liberals when it came to the vagueness of statutes used to convict criminal defendants.

Dimaya, a native of the Philippines, was admitted to the United States in 1992 as a lawful permanent resident. In 2007 and 2009, he pleaded no contest to charges of residential burglary in California and an immigration judge determined that Dimaya was removable from the US because of his two state court convictions.

The court held that the convictions qualified for an “aggravated felony” under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which authorizes removal of non-citizens who have been convicted of some violent crimes and defines aggravated felony to include “crimes of violence.”

read: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/politics/supreme-court-federal-law-deportation-immigrants/index.html/