Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-979_h3ci.pdf
Page Number: 40

Cite as:  596 U. S. ____ (2022) 

19 

GORSUCH, J., dissenting 

have  withdrawn  judicial  review  for  thousands  upon  thou-
sands  of  lawfully  present  persons  annually,  and  done  so
without expressly discussing the question.  Often this Court 
rejects as implausible statutory interpretations that seek to 
squeeze elephants into mouseholes.  See, e.g., Whitman v. 
American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457, 468 (2001). 
Today’s interpretation seeks to cram a veritable legislative
zoo into one clause of one subparagraph of one subsection 
of our Nation’s vast immigration laws. 

* 
The majority concludes that courts are powerless to cor-
rect an agency decision holding an individual ineligible for 
relief from removal based on a factual error, no matter how 
egregious the error might be.  The majority’s interpretation 
has the further consequence of denying any chance to cor-
rect  agency  errors  in  processing  green-card  applications 
outside the removal context.  Even the government cannot
bring itself to endorse the majority’s arresting conclusions. 
For good reason.  Those conclusions are at war with all the 
evidence before us.  They read language out of the statute 
and collapse the law’s clear two-step framework.  They dis-
regard  the  lessons  of  neighboring  provisions  and  even  ig-
nore  the  statute’s  very  title.    They  make  no  sense  of  the
statute’s  history.    Altogether,  the  majority’s  novel  expan-
sion of a narrow statutory exception winds up swallowing 
the law’s general rule guaranteeing individuals the chance 
to seek judicial review to correct obvious bureaucratic mis-
steps.  It is a conclusion that turns an agency once account-
able to the rule of law into an authority unto itself.  Perhaps
some would welcome a world like that.  But it is hardly the
world Congress ordained.