Judge Rules Immigrants Can Seek Amnesty
Despite 16 years of wrangling, he says program's still valid.

July 25, 2002
By Denny Walsh -- Bee Staff Writer

Despite 16 years of legal and legislative maneuvering by the government, tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants nationwide remain eligible to seek legitimate status under a 1986 amnesty program, a federal judge in Sacramento ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton noted that events during the intervening years will make it more difficult to process the applications, but said immigration authorities must face the reality that up to 350,000 people were unlawfully barred from applying for amnesty.

He gave the attorneys for the government and the immigrants 45 days to come up with a joint plan -- in the form of an injunction -- for implementing his ruling.

"The court fully understands the mutual suspicion that this litigation has engendered," Karlton wrote in a 46-page order. "Nonetheless, the court has some small hope that the parties will come to the conclusion that cooperation rather than further interminable litigation is the best course."

The order scuttles yet another attempt by the U.S. attorney general and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to rid themselves of one of the longest-running class-action lawsuits in the nation.

It was filed in 1986 on behalf of immigrants who were disqualified from the amnesty program because they had temporarily left the United States at some previous time.

Karlton found in 1988 that such a restriction was invalid under the terms of the amnesty statute -- called the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). As a remedy, he ordered an extension of the application period.

That 14-year-old decision "remains the law of the case," the judge declared in Wednesday's order.

In their latest motion for summary judgment, government lawyers argued on behalf of Attorney General John Ashcroft and the INS that a 2001 law supersedes the amnesty program and makes the immigrants' suit moot.

Not so, said Karlton. He found that the Legal Immigration Family Equity (LIFE) Act merely provides many of the class members an alternate route to legal residency.

For instance, he said, family unity benefits are more favorable under the amnesty measure than the LIFE Act, and an immigrant eligible to apply for status adjustment under both statutes might prefer to proceed under the older law for that reason.

The government cited an INS regulation that allows the agency to consider an application under the terms of the amnesty program if it fails to meet the LIFE criteria.

But the judge was not ready to place the immigrants' fate at the mercy of INS discretion.

The 1986 statute was meant to allow more than 3 million immigrants -- including 1.6 million California residents -- to emerge from the shadow world of the undocumented. Those granted amnesty were eligible for work permits, lawful residency and -- eventually -- citizenship.

To qualify, applicants had to show their continuous presence in the United States from 1982 to May 4, 1988, when the application period closed, but "brief, casual and innocent" absences abroad were permitted.

INS implementation regulations, however, disqualified an immigrant who had been out of the country without prior approval of the agency.

Once Karlton invalidated that interpretation of the statute, the case bounced around for years among his court, the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. Congress even passed a law in 1996 stripping the judge of his jurisdiction, and he was forced to dismiss the case. He reopened it after the LIFE Act repealed that law.

"The intervening delay has made both the identity of potential class members and the means of informing them of their right to apply more difficult," Karlton acknowledged in Wednesday's order. "Moreover, the passage of time has undoubtedly affected the availability of evidence to support their claims.

"In addition, the resources and people (then) available to process the legalization program ... undoubtedly have been allocated elsewhere. Finally, the agency now has institutional problems arising out of recent events that did not exist in the past."

The latter reference is, at least in part, to last month's proposal by President Bush to split off the INS from the Justice Department.

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