Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, on Thursday, joined the liberal wing of the Supreme Court to rule against the federal government in an immigration case.
The case, Niz-Chavez v. Garland, concerned a technical question about how the government sends deportation notices to nonresidents who have been living in the United States. The court held that the government must send a single notice in order to trigger the “stop-time rule,” a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that ends a nonresident’s claims on a “continuous stay” in the country. The federal government, up to that point, had sent multiple forms giving piecemeal information about nonresidents’ deportation hearings.
Gorsuch, in his majority opinion, wrote that the court’s ruling hinged on the fact that Congress, in adopting the act, wrote that the federal government must send nonresidents “a notice.”
“To trigger the stop-time rule, the government must serve ‘a’ notice containing all the information Congress has specified,” Gorsuch wrote. “To an ordinary reader — both in 1996 and today — ‘a’ notice would seem to suggest just that: ‘a’ single document containing the required information, not a mishmash of pieces with some assembly required.”
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