Background
John Patrick Doherty was a citizen of Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. In May 1980, Doherty and fellow members of the Irish Republican Army ambushed a car containing members of the British army, killing one of them. Doherty was tried for murder in Northern Ireland, but escaped from the maximum security prison where he was being held during the trial. He was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison. After escaping from prison, however, Doherty entered the United States illegally in 1982. He was discovered in June 1983, and deportation proceedings were initiated. During these proceedings, Doherty applied for asylum and withholding of deportation. The United Kingdom asked the United States to extradite Doherty, but a federal judge ruled that he was not extraditable because his crimes were considered political offenses for which extradition was not required.
Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom in the north-east of the island of Ireland, variously described as a country, province or region. Northern Ireland shares a border to the south and west with the Republic of Ireland. In 2011, its population was 1,810,863, constituting about 30% of the island's total population and about 3% of the UK's population. Established by the Northern Ireland Act 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Assembly holds responsibility for a range of devolved policy matters, while other areas are reserved for the British government. Northern Ireland co-operates with the Republic of Ireland in some areas, and the Agreement granted the Republic the ability to "put forward views and proposals" with "determined efforts to resolve disagreements between the two governments".
Ireland, also known as the Republic of Ireland, is a country in north-western Europe occupying 26 of 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, which is located on the eastern part of the island, and whose metropolitan area is home to around a third of the country's over 4.8 million inhabitants. The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom. It is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the Celtic Sea to the south, St George's Channel to the south-east, and the Irish Sea to the east. It is a unitary, parliamentary republic. The legislature, the Oireachtas, consists of a lower house, Dáil Éireann, an upper house, Seanad Éireann, and an elected President who serves as the largely ceremonial head of state, but with some important powers and duties. The head of government is the Taoiseach, who is elected by the Dáil and appointed by the President; the Taoiseach in turn appoints other government ministers.
The United Kingdom (UK), officially the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and sometimes referred to as Britain, is a sovereign country located off the north-western coast of the European mainland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Celtic Sea to the south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland. With an area of 242,500 square kilometres (93,600 sq mi), the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world. It is also the 22nd-most populous country, with an estimated 66.0 million inhabitants in 2017.
At the conclusion of the extradition proceedings, the deportation proceedings resumed. Doherty conceded deportability and designated Ireland as the country to which he should be deported. He then withdrew his applications for asylum and withholding of deportation. The INS challenged Doherty's selection of Ireland as his country of deportation, but the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected the selection as unsupported by clear evidence. The INS then appealed this determination to the Attorney General. Ultimately, Attorney General Edwin Meese reversed the BIA and ordered Doherty deported to the United Kingdom.
The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) is an administrative appellate body within the Executive Office for Immigration Review of the United States Department of Justice.
Edwin Meese III is an American attorney, law professor, author and member of the Republican Party who served in official capacities within the Ronald Reagan Gubernatorial Administration (1967–1974), the Reagan Presidential Transition Team (1980) and the Reagan White House (1981–1985), eventually rising to hold the position of the 75th Attorney General of the United States (1985–1988).
By this time, the Irish Extradition Act had been passed, under which criminals in Ireland would face trial in the United Kingdom. Doherty thus sought to reopen the deportation proceedings in order to present his claims for asylum and withholding of deportation. He asserted that under the Irish Extradition Act, the British would seek to extradite him to the United Kingdom from Ireland if he should return there, and consequently he feared persecution in the United Kingdom. The BIA granted Doherty's motion to reopen, and the INS again appealed to the Attorney General. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh found three grounds for denying the motion to reopen.
The Second Circuit affirmed Meese's order of deportation but reversed Thornburgh's order denying Doherty's motion to reopen. It believed that the Irish Extradition Act, coupled with Meese's denial of his designation of Ireland as his country of deportation (itself an unusual act) was new evidence that entitled Doherty to reopening. It also ruled that following INS v. Abudu , 485 U.S. 94 (1988), the Attorney General lacked discretion to deny reopening once an alien had established a prima facie case for withholding of deportation. Finally, the Second Circuit ordered the BIA to reevaluate Doherty's claim for asylum in light of the "foreign policy concerns" inherent in deporting a member of the IRA to Ireland.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals. Its territory comprises the states of Connecticut, New York, and Vermont, and the court has appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Abudu, 485 U.S. 94 (1988), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court shifted the balance toward adjudications made by the INS and away from those made by the federal courts of appeals when aliens who had been ordered deported seek to present new evidence in order to avoid deportation. The Court ruled that courts must review the Board of Immigration Appeals's decision to deny motions to reopen immigration proceedings—the name of the procedural device used to present new evidence to immigration officials—for abuse of discretion.
The United States Reports are the official record of the rulings, orders, case tables, in alphabetical order both by the name of the petitioner and by the name of the respondent, and other proceedings of the Supreme Court of the United States. United States Reports, once printed and bound, are the final version of court opinions and cannot be changed. Opinions of the court in each case are prepended with a headnote prepared by the Reporter of Decisions, and any concurring or dissenting opinions are published sequentially. The Court's Publication Office oversees the binding and publication of the volumes of United States Reports, although the actual printing, binding, and publication are performed by private firms under contract with the United States Government Publishing Office.
John Demjanjuk was a retired Ukrainian-American auto worker, a former soldier in the Soviet Red Army, and a POW during the Second World War.
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983), was a United States Supreme Court case ruling in 1983 that the one-house legislative veto violated the constitutional separation of powers.
Walter Polovchak is a Ukrainian-American man who, as a child, became the center of the legal case Polovchak v. Meese after he refused, at 12, to leave the United States to return to Ukraine, then part of the USSR, with his parents.
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478 (1992), is a case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that a Guatemalan man seeking asylum in the United States of America as a result of forced conscription in a guerrilla army did not establish persecution on account of political opinion, a legal requirement for asylum.
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Predrag Stevic, 467 U.S. 407 (1984), was a U.S. Supreme Court case holding that an alien seeking to avoid deportation proceedings by claiming that he would be persecuted if returned to his native land must show a "clear probability" that he will be persecuted there.
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421 (1987), decided that the standard for withholding of removal set in INS v. Stevic, was too high a standard for applicants for asylum to satisfy. In its place, and consistent with the standard set by the United Nations, the Court in Cardoza-Fonseca held that an applicant for asylum in the United States only needs to demonstrate a "well-founded fear" of persecution, which can be met even if the applicant does not show that it is more likely than not he will be persecuted if returned to his home country.
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Aguirre-Aguirre, 526 U.S. 415 (1999), examined a doctrinal question last presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Cardoza-Fonseca. In Aguirre-Aguirre, the Court determined that federal courts had to defer to the Board of Immigration Appeals's interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Cancellation of removal or termination of removal, formerly known as suspension of deportation, under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of the United States is a legal remedy available to all qualified people who have been placed in removal proceedings. Cancellation of removal is linked by reference to a waiver of inadmissibility, which is another form of relief under the INA that effectively operates parallel to cancellation of removal.
The term aggravated felony was created by the United States Congress as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to define a special category of criminal offenses. The INA says that certain aliens "convicted of an aggravated felony shall be considered to have been convicted of a particularly serious crime." Every "legal immigrant," including a "national but not a citizen of the United States," who has been convicted of any aggravated felony is ineligible for citizenship of the United States, and other than a refugee, every alien who has been convicted of any aggravated felony is ineligible to receive a visa or be admitted to the United States, if his or her "term of imprisonment was completed within the previous 15 years."
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289 (2001), is a United States Supreme Court case involving habeas corpus and INA § 212(c) relief for deportable aliens.
Joe Doherty is a former volunteer in the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who escaped during his 1981 trial for killing a member of the Special Air Service (SAS) in 1980. He was arrested in the United States in 1983, and became a cause célèbre while fighting an ultimately unsuccessful nine-year legal battle against extradition and deportation, with a street corner in New York City being named after him. A first season episode of Law & Order entitled The Troubles was based on his case.
Removal proceedings are administrative proceedings to determine an alien's removability from the United States and his or her eligibility for relief under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Procedural defenses such as collateral estoppel and double jeopardy do not apply to the current removal proceedings, and the burden of proof required in these proceedings differ between lawful permanent residents of the United States and foreign nationals.
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) is a non-profit legal services organization in Washington State. NWIRP's mission is to promote justice by defending and advancing the rights of immigrants through direct legal services, systemic advocacy, and community education.
Exceptional circumstances or exceptional situations are the conditions required to grant additional powers to a government agency, particularly a government leader or a judge, so as to alleviate, or mitigate, unforeseen or unconventional hardship. The term is commonly used in Australia, where it has been applied in various contexts, most recognizably in relation to special consideration policies for students and drought relief payments for farmers known as Exceptional Circumstances Relief Payments or ECRP. It is similarly used in the law of the United States, particularly in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Expedited removal is the term for a process related to immigration enforcement in the United States during which certain aliens are denied entry to and/or physically removed from the United States, without going through the normal removal proceedings. Whereas the legal authority for expedited removal allows for its use against most unauthorized entrants who have been in the United States for less than two years, its rollout so far has been restricted to people seeking admission and those who have been in the United States for 14 days or less, and excludes first-time violators from Mexico and Canada.
Boika v. Holder, 727 F.3d 735, is a precedent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit addressing an alien's motion to reopen after the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) had denied her applications for asylum, withholding of removal, and for relief under the convention against torture. Judge David F. Hamilton wrote the opinion for the three-judge panel which granted the petition for review and remanded the case to the BIA for further proceedings.
American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh 760 F. Supp. 796, formerly American Baptist Churches v Meese, is a settlement reached on January 31, 1991 that resulted from a class action lawsuit against the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and the Department of State. (DOS). The suit was filed in 1985 by a coalition of religious organizations, refugee legal assistance organizations, and numerous human rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the National Lawyers Guild.(NLG) Although the case originally stated two different groups of plaintiffs, various religious organizations involved in the Sanctuary movement and Central American refugees, after changes were made to criminal laws formerly used to prosecute these religious organizations, the focus of the suit was centered more specifically to claims of discrimination against Central American refugees in asylum seeking processes. This, they argued, was in direct violation of the tenets of the Refugee Act of 1980, which sought to create uniform criteria by which to review cases in which individuals fleeing political persecution and humanitarian crises would become eligible for asylum. After five years, the settlement secured temporary protected status (TPS) for many Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants, providing them with among other things, de novo asylum interviews, stays from deportation and work authorization.
Reyes Mata v. Lynch, 576 U.S. ___ (2015), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that the federal courts of appeals have jurisdiction to review the orders of the Board of Immigration Appeals to reject motions to reopen.
Deportation of Afghan refugees from the United States refers to the refoulment of Afghan refugees with no criminal conviction and the involuntary removal of Afghan-Americans who have been convicted of a common crime in the United States. Some of these individuals in removal proceedings were admitted to the United States in the 1980s with their refugee family members after escaping from genocide and persecution, and have continuously spent decades as legal immigrants.
