Supreme Court agrees to consider immigrant detention case
January 16, 2004 cnn.com
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court said Friday it will decide whether authorities can imprison indefinitely hundreds of Cuban immigrant criminals and other illegal non-U.S. citizens with no country to accept them.
About 2,220 people are in jail now, in limbo because the U.S. government says they're too dangerous to be freed but they have no homeland.
The Bush administration wants the court to say that longtime detentions are OK, especially in light of post-September 11 concerns about protecting America's borders.
But the government narrowly lost the last time the issue came before the high court. Justices ruled in 2001 that it would be unconstitutional to detain legal immigrants who have served time for crimes for more than six months. In this follow-up case, justices will decide if people who come to America illegally, like Mariel Cubans, have the same rights.
Solicitor General Theodore Olson warned justices that they could create a "back door into the United States" for dangerous non-U.S. citizens.
The test case involves a now-45-year-old man who fled Cuba with thousands of other people in 1980. Daniel Benitez was sent to prison in Florida for armed robbery, burglary and battery.
He finished his sentence in 2001, but has been in U.S. immigration custody since then, under a 1996 law that tightened restrictions on criminal aliens. The law allows extended jailings for people facing deportation, if the attorney general believes they are dangerous or will try to avoid being deported.
His lawyer, John Mills of Jacksonville, Florida, said that Benitez and the others "face the very real possibility of spending the rest of their lives incarcerated, not because of any crimes they may have committed, but because their countries will not take them back."
Benitez is not a terrorist, he said, and the case does not affect the government's authority to lock up enemy combatants. The last court ruling on the subject of immigrant criminals was about two months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The administration played up the terrorist angle in its filings in the case. Olson told justices that forcing the release of immigrants "creates an obvious gap in border security that could be exploited by hostile governments or organizations that seek to place persons in the United States for their own purposes."
Government records show that about 2,269 immigrants are in prison, and more than half have been detained more than six months, including 920 Mariel Cubans.
Lower courts have split on what to do with them, after the 2001 Supreme Court ruling. The government has been told by some courts to release 63 detainees.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in the Benitez case, ruled that courts should not interfere with the power of the other political branches to imprison dangerous illegal immigrants.
"Creating a right to parole for unadmitted aliens after six months would create an unprotected spot in this country's defense of its borders," the court ruled last summer.
Both the government and Benitez urged the court to address the issue now. The case will be argued in April, with a ruling before July. Top