(Slip Opinion) OCTOBER TERM, 2005 1 

Syllabus 

NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is

being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.

The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been

prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. 

See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337. 

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 

Syllabus 

FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES, ATTORNEY 

GENERAL

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR 

THE TENTH CIRCUIT 

No. 04–1376. Argued March 22, 2006—Decided June 22, 2006 

Immigration law has for some time provided that an order for removing 

an alien present unlawfully may be reinstated if he leaves and 

unlawfully reenters. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant 

Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) amended the Immigration and

Nationality Act (INA) to enlarge the class of illegal reentrants whose 

orders may be reinstated and limit the possible relief from a removal

order available to them. See §241(a)(5), 8 U. S. C. §1235(a)(5). Petitioner Fernandez-Vargas, a Mexican citizen, illegally reentered the 

United States in 1982, after having been deported. He remained undetected for over 20 years, fathering a son in 1989 and marrying the 

boy’s mother, a United States citizen, in 2001. After he filed an application to adjust his status to that of a lawful permanent resident,

the Government began proceedings to reinstate his 1981 deportation

order under §241(a)(5), and deported him. He petitioned the Tenth

Circuit to review the reinstatement order, claiming that, because he 

illegally reentered the county before IIRIRA’s effective date, 

§241(a)(5) did not bar his application for adjustment of status, and

that §241(a)(5) would be impermissibly retroactive if it did bar his adjustment application. The court held that §241(a)(5) barred his application and followed Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U. S. 244, 

in determining that the new law had no impermissibly retroactive effect in his case. 

Held: Section 241(a)(5) applies to those who reentered the United 

States before IIRIRA’s effective date and does not retroactively affect 

any right of, or impose any burden on, the continuing violator of the 

INA now before this Court. Pp. 5–16.

(a) Statutes are disfavored as retroactive when their application 
2 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

Syllabus 

“would impair rights a party possessed when he acted, increase a 

party’s liability for past conduct, or impose new duties with respect to

transactions already completed.” Landgraf, supra, at 280. A statute 

is not given retroactive effect “unless such construction is required by

explicit language or by necessary implication.” United States v. St. 

Louis, S. F. & T. R. Co., 270 U. S. 1, 3. In determining whether a 

statute has an impermissibly retroactive effect, the Court first looks 

to “whether Congress has expressly prescribed the statute’s proper 

reach,” Landgraf, supra, at 280, and in the absence of express language tries to draw a comparably firm conclusion about the temporal

reach specifically intended by applying its “normal rules of construction,” Lindh v. Murphy, 521 U. S. 320, 326. If that effort fails, the 

Court asks whether applying the statute to the person objecting

would have a retroactive effect in the disfavored sense of “affecting 

substantive rights, liabilities, or duties [on the basis of] conduct arising before [its] enactment,” Landgraf, supra, at 278. If the answer is 

yes, the Court then applies the presumption against retroactivity by

construing the statute as inapplicable to the event or act in question. 

INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U. S. 289, 316. Pp. 5–7.

(b) Common principles of statutory interpretation fail to unsettle

§241(a)(5)’s apparent application to any reentrant present in the

country, whatever the date of return. The statute does not expressly

include in or exclude from §241(a)(5)’s ambit individuals who illegally

entered the country before IIRIRA’s effective date. FernandezVargas argues that the fact that the old reinstatement provision applied to aliens who had “unlawfully reentered . . . after having previously departed or been deported . . . , whether before or after June 27,

1952 [the INA’s effective date], on any ground described in . . . subsection (e),” §242(f), while §241(a)(5) lacks language of temporal

reach, shows that Congress no longer meant to cover preenactment 

reentrants. But the old before-or-after clause, which was sandwiched 

between references to departure or deportation and grounds for deportation, most naturally referred not to an alien’s illegal reentry but 

to the previous deportation or departure. The better inference is that 

the clause was removed because, in 1996, application keyed to departures in 1952 or earlier was academic. Applying §241(a)(5) only to

deportations or departures after IIRIRA’s effective date would exempt anyone who departed before that date but reentered after it.

That would be a strange result, since the statute was revised to expand the scope of the reinstatement authority and invest it with

something closer to finality. Fernandez-Vargas errs in suggesting 

that the new law is bereft of clarity and the Court should apply the

presumption against retroactivity as a tool for interpreting the statute at the first Landgraf step. It is not until a statute is shown to 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 3 

Syllabus 

have no firm provision about temporal reach but to produce a retroactive effect when straightforwardly applied that the presumption has 

its work to do. And IIRIRA has other provisions on temporal reach,

which blunt Fernandez-Vargas’s argument that a negative inference

in his favor may be drawn from removal of the before-or-after clause.

Pp. 7–10.

(c) This facial reading is confirmed by two features of IIRIRA.

First, the provision’s text shows that it applies here not because Fernandez-Vargas reentered at any particular time, but because he 

chose to remain after the new statute became effective. While the 

law looks back to “an alien [who] has reentered . . . illegally,” 8

U. S. C. §1231(a)(5), the provision does not penalize an alien for the

reentry; it establishes a process to remove him under a “prior order

any time after the reentry,” ibid. Thus, it is the conduct of remaining

in the country after entry that is the predicate action; the law applies

to stop an indefinitely continuing violation that the alien could end at

any time by voluntarily leaving. It is therefore the alien’s choice to 

continue his illegal presence, after illegal reentry and after the new 

law’s effective date, that subjects him to the new and less generous 

regime, not a past act that is he helpless to undo. INS v. St. Cyr, supra, distinguished. Second, IIRIRA’s effective date provision shows 

that Fernandez-Vargas had ample warning of the coming change in 

the law, but chose to remain until the old regime expired and 

§241(a)(5) took its place. He had an opportunity to avoid the new 

law’s application by leaving the country and ending his violation during the 6 months between IIRIRA’s enactment and effective date. 

For that matter, he could have married his son’s mother and applied 

for adjustment of status during the period, in which case he would at

least have had a claim that proven reliance on the law should be honored by applying the presumption against retroactivity. Instead, he 

augmented his 15 years of unlawful presence by remaining in the 

country into the future subject to the new law. And the presumption

against retroactivity does not amount to a presumption of legal stasis

for the benefit of continuous lawbreakers. Pp. 11–15. 

394 F. 3d 881, affirmed. 

SOUTER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, 

C. J., and SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, GINSBURG, BREYER, and ALITO, 

JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion. 
_________________ 

_________________ 

Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 1 

Opinion of the Court 

NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the

preliminary print of the United States Reports. Readers are requested to

notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order

that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press. 

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 

No. 04–1376 

HUMBERTO FERNANDEZ-VARGAS, PETITIONER v.

ALBERTO R. GONZALES, ATTORNEY GENERAL 

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF 

APPEALS FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT

[June 22, 2006] 

JUSTICE SOUTER delivered the opinion of the Court. 

For some time, the law has provided that an order for

removing an alien present unlawfully may be reinstated if

he leaves and unlawfully enters again. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 

(IIRIRA), Pub. L. 104–208, div. C, 110 Stat. 3009–546, 

enlarged the class of illegal reentrants whose orders may 

be reinstated and limited the possible relief from a removal order available to them. See Immigration and 

Nationality Act (INA), §241(a)(5), 66 Stat. 204, as added 

by IIRIRA §305(a)(3), 110 Stat. 3009–599, 8 U. S. C. 

§1231(a)(5). The questions here are whether the new 

version of the reinstatement provision is correctly read to 

apply to individuals who reentered the United States

before IIRIRA’s effective date, and whether such a reading 

may be rejected as impermissibly retroactive. We hold the 

statute applies to those who entered before IIRIRA and 

does not retroactively affect any right of, or impose any 

burden on, the continuing violator of the INA now before 

us. 
2 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES

Opinion of the Court

I 

In 1950, Congress provided that deportation orders 

issued against some aliens who later reentered the United

States illegally could be reinstated.1 Internal Security Act

of 1950, §23(d), 64 Stat. 1012, 8 U. S. C. §156(d) (1946 ed.,

Supp. V).2 Only specific illegal reentrants were subject to

the provision, those deported as “anarchists” or “subversives,” for example, see §23(c), 64 Stat. 1012, while the 

rest got the benefit of the ordinary deportation rules.

Congress retained a reinstatement provision two years 

later when it revised the immigration laws through the 

INA, §242(f), 66 Stat. 212, as codified in this subsection: 

“Should the Attorney General find that any alien has

unlawfully reentered the United States after having 

previously departed or been deported pursuant to an

order of deportation, whether before or after June 27,

1952,3 on any ground described in subsection (e) . . . ,

the previous order of deportation shall be deemed to 

be reinstated from its original date and such alien

shall be deported under such previous order at any 

time subsequent to such reentry.” 8 U. S. C. §1252(f) 

(1994 ed.). 

—————— 

1What was formerly known as “deportation” is now called “removal”

in IIRIRA. See Neuman, Habeas Corpus, Executive Detention, and the 

Removal of Aliens, 98 Colum. L. Rev. 961, 966 (1998) (IIRIRA “realigned the vocabulary of immigration law, creating a new category of 

‘removal’ proceedings that largely replaces what were formerly exclusion proceedings and deportation proceedings”). Our use of each term 

here will vary according to the scheme under discussion. 2This is the full text of the provision: “Should any alien subject to the

provisions of subsection (c) unlawfully return to the United States after 

having been released for departure or deported pursuant to this section, 

the previous warrant of deportation against him shall be considered as

reinstated from its original date of issuance.” 3A date was inserted when the provision was codified; as originally

enacted, the text read, “whether before or after the date of enactment of 

this Act.” 66 Stat. 212. 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 3 

Opinion of the Court 

Again, only a limited class of illegal reentrants was susceptible, see §242(e), 66 Stat. 211; cf. §241(a), id., at 204, 

and even those affected could seek some varieties of discretionary relief, see, e.g., 8 U. S. C. §1254(a)(1) (1994 ed.) 

(suspension of deportation available to aliens who maintained a continuous presence in the United States for 

seven years and could demonstrate extreme hardship and

a good moral character).

In IIRIRA, Congress replaced this reinstatement provision with one that toed a harder line, as the old §242(f) 

was displaced by the new §241(a)(5): 

“If the Attorney General finds that an alien has reentered the United States illegally after having been 

removed or having departed voluntarily, under an order of removal, the prior order of removal is reinstated 

from its original date and is not subject to being reopened or reviewed, the alien is not eligible and may 

not apply for any relief under this chapter, and the 

alien shall be removed under the prior order at any 

time after the reentry.” 8 U. S. C. §1231(a)(5) (1994 

ed., Supp. III). 

The new law became effective on April 1, 1997, “the first 

day of the first month beginning more than 180 days after”

IIRIRA’s enactment. §309(a), 110 Stat. 3009–625. Unlike 

its predecessor, §241(a)(5) applies to all illegal reentrants, 

explicitly insulates the removal orders from review, and 

generally forecloses discretionary relief from the terms of

the reinstated order.4 

—————— 

4Notwithstanding the absolute terms in which the bar on relief is

stated, even an alien subject to §241(a)(5) may seek withholding of

removal under 8 U. S. C. §1231(b)(3)(A) (2000 ed.) (alien may not be 

removed to country if “the alien’s life or freedom would be threatened in

that country because of the alien’s race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion”), or under 8 CFR 

§§241.8(e) and 208.31 (2006) (raising the possibility of asylum to aliens 
4 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES

Opinion of the Court

II 

Humberto Fernandez-Vargas is a citizen of Mexico, who

first came to the United States in the 1970s, only to be

deported for immigration violations, and to reenter, several times, his last illegal return having been in 1982. 

Then his luck changed, and for over 20 years he remained 

undetected in Utah, where he started a trucking business 

and, in 1989, fathered a son, who is a United States citizen. In 2001, Fernandez-Vargas married the boy’s

mother, who is also a United States citizen. She soon filed 

a relative-visa petition on behalf of her husband, see 8 

U. S. C. §§1154(a), 1151(b) (2000 ed.); see FernandezVargas v. Ashcroft, 394 F. 3d 881, 883, n. 4 (CA10 2005), on

the basis of which he filed an application to adjust his 

status to that of lawful permanent resident, see §1255(i).

The filings apparently tipped off the authorities to his 

illegal presence here, and in November 2003, the Government began proceedings under §241(a)(5) that eventuated 

in reinstating Fernandez-Vargas’s 1981 deportation order, 

but without the possibility of adjusting his status to lawful

residence. He was detained for 10 months before being

removed to Juarez, Mexico in September 2004. 

Fernandez-Vargas petitioned the United States Court of

Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to review the reinstatement

order. He took the position that because he illegally reentered the country before IIRIRA’s effective date, the controlling reinstatement provision was the old §242(f), which

meant he was eligible to apply for adjustment of status as

spouse of a citizen, and he said that the new §241(a)(5) 

would be impermissibly retroactive if it barred his application for adjustment. The Court of Appeals held that 

§241(a)(5) did bar Fernandez-Vargas’s application and 

followed Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U. S. 244 

(1994), in determining that the new law had no impermissi-

—————— 

whose removal order has been reinstated under INA §241(a)(5)). 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 5 

Opinion of the Court 

bly retroactive effect in Fernandez-Vargas’s case. 394 F. 3d, 

at 886, 890–891. We granted certiorari to resolve a split 

among the Courts of Appeals over the application of

§241(a)(5) to an alien who reentered illegally before 

IIRIRA’s effective date,

5 546 U. S. ___ (2005), and we now 

affirm. 

III 

Statutes are disfavored as retroactive when their application “would impair rights a party possessed when he 

acted, increase a party’s liability for past conduct, or impose new duties with respect to transactions already 

completed.” Landgraf, supra, at 280. The modern law 

thus follows Justice Story’s definition of a retroactive 

statute, as “tak[ing] away or impair[ing] vested rights

acquired under existing laws, or creat[ing] a new obligation, impos[ing] a new duty, or attach[ing] a new disability, in respect to transactions or considerations already

past,” Society for the Propagation of the Gospel v. Wheeler, 

22 F. Cas. 756, 767 (No. 13,156) (CCNH 1814). Accordingly, it has become “a rule of general application” that “a 

—————— 

5Two Courts of Appeals have held that §241(a)(5) does not apply at

all to aliens who reentered before the provision’s effective date, see 

Bejjani v. INS, 271 F. 3d 670 (CA6 2001); Castro-Cortez v. INS, 239 

F. 3d 1037 (CA9 2001), while eight have held that it does, at least in

some circumstances, see Arevalo v. Ashcroft, 344 F. 3d 1 (CA1 2003); 

Avila-Macias v. Ashcroft, 328 F. 3d 108 (CA3 2003); Velasquez-Gabriel 

v. Crocetti, 263 F. 3d 102 (CA4 2001); Ojeda-Terrazas v. Ashcroft, 290 

F. 3d 292 (CA5 2002); Faiz-Mohammad v. Ashcroft, 395 F. 3d 799 (CA7 

2005); Alvarez-Portillo v. Ashcroft, 280 F. 3d 858 (CA8 2002); 394 F. 3d 

881 (CA10 2005) (case below); Sarmiento Cisneros v. United States 

Attorney General, 381 F. 3d 1277 (CA11 2004). The Courts of Appeals 

in the majority are themselves divided on the question whether an

alien’s marriage or application for adjustment of status before the 

statute’s effective date (facts not in play here) renders the statute

impermissibly retroactive when it is applied to the alien. See, e.g., 

Faiz-Mohammad, supra, at 809–810 (application for adjustment of 

status); Alvarez-Portillo, supra, at 862, 867 (marriage). 
6 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

Opinion of the Court 

statute shall not be given retroactive effect unless such

construction is required by explicit language or by necessary implication.” United States v. St. Louis, S. F. & T. R. 

Co., 270 U. S. 1, 3 (1926) (opinion for the Court by 

Brandeis, J.).

This Court has worked out a sequence of analysis when

an objection is made to applying a particular statute said

to affect a vested right or to impose some burden on the 

basis of an act or event preceding the statute’s enactment. 

We first look to “whether Congress has expressly prescribed the statute’s proper reach,” Landgraf, supra, at 

280, and in the absence of language as helpful as that we 

try to draw a comparably firm conclusion about the temporal reach specifically intended by applying “our normal

rules of construction,” Lindh v. Murphy, 521 U. S. 320, 326 

(1997). If that effort fails, we ask whether applying the 

statute to the person objecting would have a retroactive

consequence in the disfavored sense of “affecting substantive rights, liabilities, or duties [on the basis of] conduct

arising before [its] enactment,” Landgraf, supra, at 278; 

see also Lindh, supra, at 326. If the answer is yes, we

then apply the presumption against retroactivity by construing the statute as inapplicable to the event or act in 

question owing to the “absen[ce of] a clear indication from

Congress that it intended such a result.” INS v. St. Cyr, 

533 U. S. 289, 316 (2001); see Martin v. Hadix, 527 U. S. 

343, 352 (1999) (quoting Landgraf, supra, at 280). 

Fernandez-Vargas fights at each step of the way, arguing that Congress intended that INA §241(a)(5) would not 

apply to illegal reentrants like him who returned to this 

country before the provision’s effective date; and in any 

event, that application of the provision to such illegal

reentrants would have an impermissibly retroactive effect, 

to be avoided by applying the presumption against it. We 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 7 

Opinion of the Court 

are not persuaded by either contention.6 

A 

Needless to say, Congress did not complement the new

version of §241(a)(5) with any clause expressly dealing

with individuals who illegally reentered the country before 

IIRIRA’s April 1, 1997, effective date, either including

them within §241(a)(5)’s ambit or excluding them from it. 

Fernandez-Vargas argues instead on the basis of the

generally available interpretive rule of negative implication, when he draws attention to language governing 

temporal reach contained in the old reinstatement provision, but missing from the current one. Section 242(f)

applied to “any alien [who] has unlawfully reentered the

United States after having previously departed or been

deported pursuant to an order of deportation, whether 

before or after June 27, 1952, on any ground described in

. . . subsection (e).” 8 U. S. C. §1252(f) (1994 ed.). According to Fernandez-Vargas, since that before-or-after clause 

made it clear that the statute applied to aliens who reentered before the enactment date of the earlier version, its 

elimination in the current iteration shows that Congress 

no longer meant to cover preenactment reentrants. See 

Brewster v. Gage, 280 U. S. 327, 337 (1930) (“deliberate

selection of language . . . differing from that used in the

earlier Acts” can indicate “that a change of law was in-

—————— 

6The Government urges us to forgo Landgraf analysis altogether

because §241(a)(5) regulates only a present removal process, not past 

primary conduct, citing our recent decision in Republic of Austria v. 

Altmann, 541 U. S. 677 (2004). Although we ultimately agree with the

Government, in the abstract at least, that the reinstatement provision

concerns itself with postenactment affairs, see infra, at 13–15, we find 

the Government’s allusion to Altmann inapt. The Court’s conclusion in 

that case, that Landgraf was to be avoided, turned on the peculiarities 

of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. See Altmann, supra, at 694– 

696. Those peculiarities are absent here, and we thus advert to Landgraf, as we ordinarily do. 
8 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

Opinion of the Court 

tended”); cf. 2B N. Singer, Statutes and Statutory Construction §51.04, p. 244 (6th rev. ed. 2000). But the clues are not 

that simple.

To begin with, the old before-or-after clause was sandwiched between references to departure or deportation

under a deportation order and to grounds for deportation

set out in a different subsection of the INA. It thus most 

naturally referred not to the illegal reentry but to the 

alien’s previous deportation or departure. If its omission 

from the new subsection (a)(5) is significant, its immediate 

significance goes to the date of leaving this country, not

the date of illegal return. Since the old clause referred to 

the date of enactment of the INA in 1952, the negative

implication argument from dropping the language is that

the reinstatement section no longer applies to those who

left the country before that date. But, in 1996, application

keyed to departures in 1952 or earlier was academic, and 

the better inference is that the clause was removed for 

that reason.7 

If, moreover, we indulged any suggestion that omitting

the clause showed an intent to apply §241(a)(5) only to

deportations or departures after IIRIRA’s effective date,

the result would be a very strange one: it would exempt

from the new reinstatement provision’s coverage anyone 

who departed before IIRIRA’s effective date but reentered

after it. The point of the statute’s revision, however, was 

obviously to expand the scope of the reinstatement authority and invest it with something closer to finality, and it 

would make no sense to infer that Congress meant to 

except the broad class of persons who had departed before 

the time of enactment but who might return illegally at 

some point in the future. 

—————— 

7We therefore need not entertain Fernandez-Vargas’s argument that 

the provision’s drafting history indicates that the language was eliminated deliberately. 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 9 

Opinion of the Court 

Fernandez-Vargas sidesteps this problem (on a very 

generous reading of his argument) by making a more 

general suggestion of congressional intent: whatever the

event to which the old law was tied, activity before as well 

as activity after it implicated the reinstatement power. 

Since the new law is bereft of such clarity, we should

apply the “‘longstanding principle of construing any lingering ambiguities in deportation statutes in favor of the

alien,’” St. Cyr, 533 U. S., at 320 (quoting INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U. S. 421, 449 (1987)), which would 

effectively impose “[t]he presumption against retroactive

application of ambiguous statutory provisions,” St. Cyr, 

supra, at 320. If we did so, we would find that §241(a)(5) 

operates only to reentries after its effective date.

Even at this amorphously general level, however, the

argument suffers from two flaws, the first being that it

puts the cart before the horse. As Fernandez-Vargas

realizes, he urges application of the presumption against 

retroactivity as a tool for interpreting the statute at the 

first Landgraf step. But if that were legitimate, a statute 

lacking an express provision about temporal reach would 

never be construed as having a retroactive potential and 

the final two steps in the Landgraf enquiry would never

occur (that is, asking whether the statute would produce a

retroactive effect, and barring any such application by 

applying the presumption against retroactivity). It is not 

until a statute is shown to have no firm provision about

temporal reach but to produce a retroactive effect when

straightforwardly applied that the presumption has its

work to do. See 511 U. S., at 280. 

The second flaw is the argument’s failure to account for 

the new statute’s other provisions on temporal reach, from

which one might draw a negative inference that subsection (a)(5) was (or at least may well have been) meant to

apply to reentries before its effective date. In contrast to 

their silence about the temporal sweep of §241(a)(5), the 
10 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

Opinion of the Court 

1996 amendments speak directly to the scope of changes 

in provisions making reentry criminal and setting civil

penalties. IIRIRA §324(c), 110 Stat. 3009–629, note following 8 U. S. C. §1326 (2000 ed.), provides that the expanded criminal prohibitions, see §1326(a), apply only to 

reentries or attempts after the effective date, and §105(b), 

110 Stat. 3009–556, note following 8 U. S. C. §1325, provides the same as to civil penalties for illegal reentry, see 

§1325(b). The point here is not that these provisions alone 

would support an inference of intent to apply the reinstatement provision retroactively, see Lindh, 521 U. S., at 

328, n. 4, for we require a clear statement for that, see 

Martin, 527 U. S., at 354. But these provisions do blunt

any argument that removal of the before-or-after clause 

suffices to establish the applicability of §241(a)(5) only to

posteffective date reentries. The fact is that IIRIRA sometimes expressly made changes prospective as from its

effective date and sometimes expressly provided they were

applicable to earlier acts; compare §§324(c) and 105(b),

with §347(c), 110 Stat. 3009–639 (provision governing

removal of aliens who have unlawfully voted is applicable 

“to voting occurring before, on, or after the date of the

enactment of this Act”), and §351(c), id., at 3009–640 

(provision applicable to “waivers filed before, on, or after

the date of the enactment of this Act”). With such a variety of treatment, it is just too hard to infer any clear intention at any level of generality from the fact of retiring the

old before-or-after language from what is now §241(a)(5).

One conclusion can be stated, however. Common principles of statutory interpretation fail to unsettle the apparent application of §241(a)(5) to any reentrant present 

in the country, whatever the date of return.8 

—————— 

8 JUSTICE STEVENS states that when, in 1952, Congress inserted the

before-or-after clause with the old §242(f), it was responding to the 

Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) practice of applying the 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 11 

Opinion of the Court

B 

This facial reading is confirmed by two features of 

IIRIRA, not previously discussed, that describe the conduct to which §241(a)(5) applies, and show that the application suffers from no retroactivity in denying FernandezVargas the opportunity for adjustment of status as the 

spouse of a citizen of the United States.9 One is in the text 

of that provision itself, showing that it applies to Fernandez-Vargas today not because he reentered in 1982 or at 

any other particular time, but because he chose to remain 

after the new statute became effective. The second is the 

provision setting IIRIRA’s effective date, §309(a), 110 Stat.

3009–625, which shows that Fernandez-Vargas had an 

ample warning of the coming change in the law, but chose 

—————— 

reinstatement provision only to deportation orders issued after the 

provision’s enactment, a practice that necessarily meant INS applied

the provision only to postenactment reentries. By correcting the INS’s 

interpretation only as to deportation orders, JUSTICE STEVENS suggests, 

Congress did nothing to disturb the practice as to reentries. And when 

it removed the obsolete before-or-after clause in 1996 without adding 

alternative language of temporal reach, the argument goes, Congress

held fast to its intent in 1950 and 1952 to apply the reinstatement

provision only to postenactment reentries. But the INS’s practice circa

1951 of applying the reinstatement provision only to postenactment

reentries followed from its policy regarding deportation orders, and in

1952 Congress might just as easily have assumed that the branch 

would go the way of the root. In any event, it is difficult to accept 

JUSTICE STEVENS’s view that congressional understanding from 40 

years back was intended to govern the IIRIRA reinstatement provision,

given Congress’s care to make the revised criminal and civil penalties 

applicable only to postenactment reentries. 9We would reach the same conclusion about denial of opportunities to

apply for permission for voluntary departure as an alternative to 

removal, see 8 U. S. C. §1229c, and about cancellation of removal, see 

§1229b(b), if there were a need to deal with these matters separately.

Although Fernandez-Vargas argues that he is being denied the chance 

to seek these forms of relief, he never applied for either of them and has

not formally attempted to claim them in response to the reinstatement

and removal proceedings. 
12 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

Opinion of the Court 

to remain until the old regime expired and §241(a)(5) took 

its place.

As a preface to identifying the conduct by FernandezVargas to which the reinstatement provision applies (the 

conduct that results in reinstating the old deportation 

order without the former opportunities to seek adjustment 

of status), a look at our holding in St. Cyr, 533 U. S. 289, is 

helpful. The alien, St. Cyr, was a lawful, permanent 

resident who made a plea agreement and pleaded guilty to 

an aggravated felony charge. Although the resulting 

conviction justified his deportation, when he entered his 

plea the law allowed him to seek a waiver of deportation

at the discretion of the Attorney General. Between the 

plea and deportation proceedings, however, IIRIRA and

another statute repealed the provision for that discretionary relief, converting deportation from a possibility to a

certainty. Id., at 325. The question was whether Landgraf barred application of the new law eliminating discretionary relief, on the ground that applying it to a defendant who pleaded guilty before the enactment of the new

law would attach a further burdensome consequence to his

plea, amounting to “a new disability, in respect to transactions or considerations already past,” 533 U. S., at 321 

(internal quotation marks omitted). The answer was that 

converting deportation from a likely possibility to a dead

certainty would add such a burden, and application of the 

new law was accordingly barred. Id., at 325. In making 

this “commonsense, functional judgment,” Martin, supra,

at 357, we emphasized that plea agreements “involve a 

quid pro quo between a criminal defendant and the government,” St. Cyr, 533 U. S., at 321, in which a waiver of 

“constitutional rights (including the right to a trial),” had

been exchanged for a “perceived benefit,” id., at 322, which 

in practical terms was valued in light of the possible discretionary relief, a focus of expectation and reliance, id., at 

323. 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 13 

Opinion of the Court 

St. Cyr’s agreement for a quid pro quo and his plea were

entirely past, and there was no question of undoing them, 

but the “transactio[n] or consideratio[n]” on which 

§241(a)(5) turns is different.10 While the law looks back to 

a past act in its application to “an alien [who] has reentered . . . illegally,” 8 U. S. C. §1231(a)(5), the provision

does not penalize an alien for the reentry (criminal and

civil penalties do that); it establishes a process to remove 

him “under the prior order at any time after the reentry.” 

Ibid. Thus, it is the conduct of remaining in the country 

after entry that is the predicate action; the statute applies 

to stop an indefinitely continuing violation that the alien

himself could end at any time by voluntarily leaving the 

country. It is therefore the alien’s choice to continue his 

illegal presence, after illegal reentry and after the effective 

date of the new law, that subjects him to the new and less

generous legal regime, not a past act that he is helpless to

undo up to the moment the Government finds him out. 

That in itself is enough to explain that FernandezVargas has no retroactivity claim based on a new disabil-

—————— 

10We understand Fernandez-Vargas’s claim as falling within the 

second of Justice Story’s categories of retroactivity (new consequences

of past acts), not the first category of canceling vested rights. The 

forms of relief identified by Fernandez-Vargas as rendered unavailable 

to him by §241(a)(5) include cancellation of removal, see 8 U. S. C.

§1229b(b), adjustment of status, see §1255, and voluntary departure, 

see §1229c. These putative claims to relief are not “vested rights,” a

term that describes something more substantial than inchoate expectations and unrealized opportunities. In contrast to “an immediate fixed 

right of present or future enjoyment,” Pearsall v. Great Northern R. Co., 

161 U. S. 646, 673 (1896) (internal quotation marks omitted), FernandezVargas’s claim to such relief was contingent, and it was up to him to take 

some action that would elevate it above the level of hope. It is not that 

these forms of relief are discretionary, cf. St. Cyr, 533 U. S., at 325; it is 

rather that before IIRIRA’s effective date Fernandez-Vargas never availed

himself of them or took action that enhanced their significance to him in 

particular, as St. Cyr did in making his quid pro quo agreement, see 

supra, at 11–12. 
14 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

Opinion of the Court 

ity consequent to a completed act, but in fact his position

is weaker still. For Fernandez-Vargas could not only have

chosen to end his continuing violation and his exposure to

the less favorable law, he even had an ample warning that 

the new law could be applied to him and ample opportunity to avoid that very possibility by leaving the country 

and ending his violation in the period between enactment 

of §241(a)(5) and its effective date. IRRIRA became law on 

September 30, 1996, but it became effective and enforceable only on “the first day of the first month beginning

more than 180 days after” IIRIRA’s enactment, that is, 

April 1, 1997. §309(a), 110 Stat. 3009–625. Unlawful 

alien reentrants like Fernandez-Vargas thus had the 

advantage of a grace period between the unequivocal

warning that a tougher removal regime lay ahead and

actual imposition of the less opportune terms of the new

law. In that stretch of six months, Fernandez-Vargas

could have ended his illegal presence and potential exposure to the coming law by crossing back into Mexico.11 For 

—————— 

11 In a series of letters submitted to the Court after oral argument, 

the parties dispute the consequences if Fernandez-Vargas had left 

voluntarily after IIRIRA’s enactment and, specifically, the period of

inadmissibility to which Fernandez-Vargas would thereupon have been

subject. Because we conclude that §241(a)(5) does not operate on a 

completed pre-enactment act, we need not consider the retroactive 

implications either of the fact of his inadmissibility or of any variance

between the period of inadmissibility upon a postenactment voluntary 

return and that prescribed under the old regime. The period of inadmissibility stems from an alien’s illegal reentry within a specified time

after a prior removal and is applicable to Fernandez-Vargas because he 

reentered shortly after his 1981 deportation, but Fernandez-Vargas

does not challenge as impermissibly retroactive IIRIRA’s lengthening of 

that period from 5 to 10 or 20 years, see 8 U. S. C. §1182(a)(6)(B) (1994

ed.); §1182(a)(9)(A)(ii) (2000 ed.). 

In any event, any period of inadmissibility is subject to waiver by the

Attorney General, see §1182(a)(6)(B) (1994 ed.); §1182(a)(9)(A)(iii)

(2000 ed.), and presumably Fernandez-Vargas could plead his serious 

case for such a waiver (his marriage, his child) in seeking legal reentry 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 15 

Opinion of the Court 

that matter, he could have married the mother of his son 

and applied for adjustment of status during that period, in

which case he would at least have had a claim (about 

which we express no opinion) that proven reliance on the 

old law should be honored by applying the presumption

against retroactivity.12 

Fernandez-Vargas did not, however, take advantage of

the statutory warning, but augmented his past 15 years of

unlawful presence by remaining in the country into the

future subject to the new law, whose applicability thus

turned not on the completed act of reentry, but on a failure

to take timely action that would have avoided application

of the new law altogether. To be sure, a choice to avoid 

the new law before its effective date or to end the continuing violation thereafter would have come at a high personal price, for Fernandez-Vargas would have had to leave 

a business and a family he had established during his 

illegal residence. But the branch of retroactivity law that

concerns us here is meant to avoid new burdens imposed

on completed acts, not all difficult choices occasioned by 

new law. What Fernandez-Vargas complains of is the 

application of new law to continuously illegal action within

his control both before and after the new law took effect. He 

claims a right to continue illegal conduct indefinitely under 

the terms on which it began, an entitlement of legal stasis

for those whose lawbreaking is continuous. But “[i]f every 

time a man relied on existing law in arranging his affairs,

he were made secure against any change in legal rules, the

whole body of our law would be ossified forever.” L. Fuller, 

The Morality of Law 60 (1964) (quoted in Landgraf, 511 

U. S., at 269, n. 24).

13 

—————— 

to the United States. 12See 394 F. 3d, at 890, and n. 11 (distinguishing Fernandez-Vargas’s

circumstance from that of aliens who had married, or both married and 

applied for adjustment of status, before IIRIRA’s effective date). 13This is the nub of our disagreement with JUSTICE STEVENS. He says 
16 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

Opinion of the Court 

Because we conclude that §241(a)(5) has no retroactive

effect when applied to aliens like Fernandez-Vargas, we 

affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals. 

It is so ordered. 

—————— 

it misses the point to say that Fernandez-Vargas could avoid the new

law by returning to Mexico, which he thinks is like saying that a 

defendant could avoid a retroactive criminal penalty by locking himself

up for 10 years, post, at 5, n. 2. JUSTICE STEVENS thus argues that

reimposing an order of removal to end illegal residence is like imposing

a penalty for a completed act (the defendant’s unspecified act in his 

analogy). But even on his own analysis, Fernandez-Vargas continued 

to violate the law by remaining in this country day after day, and

JUSTICE STEVENS does not deny that the United States was entitled to

bring that continuing violation to an end. He says, however, that 

Congress should not be understood to provide that if the violation

continues into the future it may be ended on terms less favorable than

those at the beginning. But this is not the position that retroactivity

doctrine imputes to an inexplicit Congress. Fernandez-Vargas may

have an equitable argument that the Government should not, for the 

future, eliminate an opportunity for continuing illegality accompanied

by the hopes that long illegal residence and a prospect of marriage gave

him in the past. But Congress apparently did not accept such an 

argument, which could prevail here only if the presumption against 

retroactivity amounted to a presumption of legal stasis for the benefit

of continuous lawbreakers. 
_________________ 

_________________ 

Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 1 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 

No. 04–1376 

HUMBERTO FERNANDEZ-VARGAS, PETITIONER v.

ALBERTO R. GONZALES, ATTORNEY GENERAL 

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF 

APPEALS FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT

[June 22, 2006] 

JUSTICE STEVENS, dissenting. 

In 1982, petitioner Humberto Fernandez-Vargas, an

alien who had previously been deported, reentered the 

United States illegally. Over the next 20 years, petitioner 

remained here. He worked as a truckdriver, owned a 

trucking business, fathered a child, and eventually married the child’s mother, a United States citizen. The laws 

in place at the time of petitioner’s entry and for the first

15 years of his residence in this country would have rewarded this behavior, allowing him to seek discretionary

relief from deportation on the basis of his continued presence in and strong ties to the United States. See 8 U. S. C. 

§1254(a)(1) (1994 ed.).

In 1996, however, Congress passed a new version of the 

applicable provision eliminating almost entirely the possibility of relief from deportation for aliens who reenter the 

country illegally having previously been deported. See 

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), §305(a)(3), 110 Stat. 3009–599, 8 U. S. C. 

§1231(a)(5) (2000 ed.); see also ante, at 3, n. 4. The 1996 

provision is silent as to whether it was intended to apply

retroactively to conduct that predated its enactment.1 

—————— 

1The statutory provisions expanding the class of people to whom

criminal penalties for illegal reentry might apply, however, explicitly 
2 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

Despite a historical practice supporting petitioner’s reading, and despite the harsh consequences that attend its

application to thousands of individuals who, like petitioner, entered the country illegally before 1997, the Court 

not only holds that the statute applies to preenactment 

reentries but also that it has no retroactive effect. I disagree with both of these conclusions. 

I 

In 1950, when Congress first gave the Attorney General

the authority to reinstate an order of deportation, it enacted a reinstatement provision containing no explicit 

temporal reach.2 See Internal Security Act, §23(d), 64

Stat. 1012, 8 U. S. C. §156(d) (1946 ed., Supp. V). The 

natural reading of this provision, the one most consistent 

with the “deeply rooted” traditional presumption against

retroactivity, Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U. S. 

244, 265 (1994), is that it would apply to deportations that 

occurred before the provision’s enactment but not to 

preenactment reentries. While both deportation and

reentry can constitute “events completed before [the provision’s] enactment,” id., at 270, an alien’s reentry is the act 

that triggers the provision’s operation and is therefore the

act to which the provision attaches legal consequences. 

When the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) 

promulgated regulations implementing the 1950 statute,

however, it did not read the statute so naturally. Instead, 

the INS’ regulations, embodying an overly strong version 

—————— 

apply only to postenactment reentries. See IIRIRA, §324(c), 110 Stat.

3009–629, note following 8 U. S. C. §1326. 2The provision stated: 

“Should any alien subject to the provisions of subsection (c) unlawfully

return to the United States after having been released for departure or 

deported pursuant to this section, the previous war-rant of deportation

against him shall be considered as reinstated from its original date of 

issuance.” 64 Stat. 1012, codified as 8 U. S. C. §156(d) (1946 ed., Supp. 

V). 
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 3 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

of the presumption against retroactivity, provided that an

order of deportation could only be reinstated if that deportation occurred after the statute’s enactment date. See 8 

CFR §152.5 (1950 Cum. Supp.). Thus, the INS read the 

reinstatement provision as inapplicable even to reentries 

that occurred after the statute’s enactment date if the 

underlying deportation had been entered before that date;

it follows a fortiori that the provision was considered

inapplicable to reentries that occurred before the statute’s 

enactment. 

Congress corrected the INS’ error two years later by

adding the clause “whether before or after the date of 

enactment of this Act.” Immigration and Nationality Act,

§242(f), 66 Stat. 212, 8 U. S. C. §1252(f) (1994 ed.); see also 

ante, at 2, and nn. 2–3. As the Court correctly notes, that

amendment “most naturally referred not to the illegal 

reentry but to the alien’s previous deportation or departure.” Ante, at 8. The best interpretation of Congress’ 

intent with regard to the 1952 statute, then, was that it

meant to apply the reinstatement provision to preenactment deportations but to preserve the status quo with

regard to preenactment reentries: In accordance with the 

traditional presumption against retroactivity, preenactment reentries would remain uncovered by the reinstatement provision.

In 1996, when Congress enacted the current reinstatement provision, it drafted a version of the statute that, 

like its 1950 predecessor, was silent as to its temporal 

reach. See 8 U. S. C. §1231(a)(5) (2000 ed.). If we assume 

(as the Court does) that the addition of the “before-orafter” clause in the 1952 statute merely clarified Congress’ 

original intent in 1950 to make the provision applicable to 

preenactment departures without authorizing any application to preenactment reentries, it is reasonable to attribute precisely the same intent to the Congress that

enacted the 1996 statute: As in the 1950 and 1952 ver-
4 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

sions of the provision, Congress intended the 1996 reinstatement provision to apply to preenactment deportations

but not to preenactment reentries.

In sum, our normal rules of construction support the 

reasonable presumption that Congress intended the provision to cover only postenactment reentries. Accordingly,

the 1996 reinstatement provision should not be construed

to apply to petitioner’s earlier entry into the United

States. 

II 

The Court not only fails to give the 1996 Act its most 

normal interpretation, but also erroneously concludes that

the provision does not have any retroactive effect. The 

Court reaches this conclusion based on its judgment that 

the provision applies not to conduct that occurred before 

the statute’s enactment date, but rather to “an indefinitely

continuing violation that the alien himself could end at

any time by voluntarily leaving the country.” Ante, at 13. 

This reasoning is unpersuasive. 

It is true, of course, that the order of deportation entered against petitioner in 1981 could not be reinstated 

unless he was present in the United States, and that, until

he was arrested in 2003, petitioner could have chosen to

leave the United States. But it is precisely petitioner’s

“continuing violation” that allowed him to be eligible for 

relief from deportation in the first place: He was required

to have been physically present in the United States for a 

period of not less than seven years, to have been a person

of good moral character during that time, and to have 

developed ties to the United States such that his deportation would result in extreme hardship to himself or to his 

United States citizen wife or child.3 See 8 U. S. C. 

—————— 

3Although petitioner became eligible for relief from deportation after

being physically present in the United States for seven years, he could 

not apply for that relief until the Government placed him in deporta-
Cite as: 548 U. S. ____ (2006) 5 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

§1254(a)(1) (1994 ed.); see also INS v. Phinpathya, 464 

U. S. 183 (1984) (strictly construing physical presence

requirement). Moreover, under the pre-1996 version of

the reinstatement provision, the longer petitioner remained in the United States the more likely he was to be 

granted relief from deportation. See Matter of Ige, 20 I. 

& N. Dec. 880, 882 (1994) (listing factors considered in

evaluating extreme hardship requirement, including

alien’s length of residence in United States, family in

United States, business or occupation, and position in 

community).

Given these incentives, petitioner legitimately complains that the Government has changed the rules 

midgame. At the time of his entry, and for the next 15 

years, it inured to petitioner’s benefit for him to remain in 

the United States continuously, to build a business, and to 

start a family. After April 1, 1997, the date on which the 

applicable reinstatement provision became effective, all of 

these activities were rendered irrelevant in the eyes of the 

law. Only the Court’s unfortunately formalistic search for

a single “past act that [petitioner] is helpless to undo,” 

ante, at 13, allows it to conclude that the provision at issue 

has no retroactive effect.4 For regardless of whether his 

—————— 

tion proceedings, at which point he could raise his eligibility as an

affirmative defense. Cf. Hughes Aircraft Co. v. United States ex rel. 

Schumer, 520 U. S. 939, 951–952 (1997) (applying presumption against

retroactivity to statute eliminating affirmative defense). 4Even on its own terms the Court’s logic is troubling. The Court 

believes that petitioner could have avoided being affected by the 1996 

reinstatement provision, not just retroactively but in any way whatsoever, by leaving the country prior to its effective date—a date that 

occurred six months after the statute’s enactment date not to give

aliens “ample warning,” ante, at 11, 13, but instead to allow the Attorney General to prepare for the substantial changes caused by the 

IIRIRA and to promulgate regulations to effectuate that Act. See §309, 

110 Stat. 3009–625. But had petitioner “take[n] advantage of the 

statutory warning,” ante, at 15, he would have imposed upon himself 
6 FERNANDEZ-VARGAS v. GONZALES 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

1982 reentry was or was not an act that he could now 

“undo,” it is certainly an act to which the 1996 reinstatement provision has attached serious adverse consequences. Because the provision has an undeniably harsh

retroactive effect, “absent a clear indication from Congress

that it intended such a result,” INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U. S. 

289, 316 (2001), we should apply the presumption against 

retroactivity and hold that the 1996 reinstatement provision does not apply to petitioner. 

Accordingly, I respectfully dissent. 

—————— 

the very same punishment—the guarantee of removal to Mexico—that 

he hopes to avoid. Just as we would not say that a defendant may 

avoid the retroactive application of a criminal statute by locking himself up for 10 years, it cannot be that petitioner’s ability to leave the 

country of his own accord somehow helps to prove that the provision at

issue has no retroactive effect.