Judulang v. Holder

Judulang v. Holder, 565 U.S. 42 (2011), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States involving deportation law and procedure. The case involved a rule adopted by the Board of Immigration Appeals for determining the eligibility of certain long-term resident aliens, when they are facing deportation because of a prior criminal conviction, to apply to the Attorney General for relief. In a unanimous opinion delivered by Justice Elena Kagan, the Court invalidated the BIA's "comparable-grounds rule" as arbitrary and capricious, holding that it had no rational relation to the merits of an alien's claim for remaining in the United States, nor to the policy and purposes of the immigration laws.

The rule the Court invalidated only applied to long-term resident aliens who were facing deportation because of a guilty plea entered prior to 1996.

Prior to statutory amendment in 1996, the ability of the Attorney General to extend relief only applied to exclusion proceedings in section 212c, which sought to prevent aliens from entering the country. Despite the lack of a statutory basis, the Attorney General and the BIA had long provided for similar relief to resident aliens in deportation proceedings, to avoid inconsistent and unfair results. The entire system was overhauled by Congress in 1996 and section 212c was repealed. In INS v. St. Cyr, however, the Supreme Court ruled that for those aliens who had entered guilty pleas prior to the statutory change, the same 212c opportunity to apply for relief must be available as was at the time their plea was entered.

By 2005, the BIA adopted the comparative-grounds rule, which compared the statutory ground into which the alien's conviction had been classified for deportation with the statutory grounds from which aliens seeking entry into the U.S. could seek relief from exclusion. If there was not an exclusion ground that was comparable in type and scope, the alien could not apply for relief, even if the particular crime for which deportation was sought would have been covered by one of the exclusion grounds. The Court invalidated the rule, finding its statutory comparison irrelevant and the arbitrary equivalent of a coin toss.

In an editorial, The New York Times characterized the Court's "stinging opinion" as reinforcing the "message that lower courts have been sending for many years: the law applied in immigration cases too often fails to meet the standards of justice."