Source: https://takecareblog.com/blog/texas-s-more-honest-take-on-garza-v-hargan
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 01:15:46+00:00

Document:
Texas has a knack for writing amicus briefs that offer some of the more outlandish justifications for some of the federal government’s more outlandish policies. Texas did it in the entry ban litigation, arguing, against logic and doctrine, that the Youngstown framework somehow resolves the constitutional challenges to the President’s entry ban/suspension on refugees. Texas is doing it again in Garza v. Hargan, the case in which the Trump administration is attempting to impede undocumented young women’s access to abortion by refusing to release the women from its custody so that they can obtain abortions.
(1) The United States does not want to be “complicit” in an abortion by “affirmatively facilitating” one.
(3) The young women could leave the United States (for countries where they may be at risk of violence or persecution, and where abortions are not permitted).
No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
In the arguments in the district court during the first round of this litigation, the United States avoided taking the position that the undocumented young women involved in the case have no rights under the Fifth Amendment. But when the United States merely refused to concede that these women had constitutional rights, the district court was still taken aback: “That is remarkable,” the court told the government.
Texas’s position is indeed remarkable—it does not account for the text; it dismisses precedent; it has untenable implications; and it makes a mockery of the English language. It does, however, have one thing going for it: Texas’s position is a better reflection of how the Office of Refugee Resettlement views these young women—as something less than autonomous human beings.
(1) Text: See above, and below (implications).
Boumediene v. Bush, a case not discussed in the brief, held that noncitizens who are detained by the United States outside the formal territory of the United States have rights under the suspension clause. Boumediene involved people who were being forcibly held by the United States; that’s partially why, according to some commentators, the Court held that they had rights. That is also true here. Boumediene involved people who were being held in an area over which the United States has “de facto” sovereignty. That is also true here, as the United States has both de facto and de jure sovereignty over areas within its borders. Boumediene did not apply a “substantial connections” test.
Reno v. Flores, a case not discussed in the brief, rejected a due process challenge to the then-Immigration-and-Naturalization-Services’ policy of detaining non-citizen minors during the duration of immigration proceedings. The procedures were challenged on due process grounds; the Court did not take the position that, as noncitizens with potentially no substantial connections to the United States, the children lacked any rights under the due process clause at all.
Plyler v. Doe, a case discussed in the brief, held that Texas could not deny public education to undocumented children. Texas distinguishes Plyer on the ground that its analysis purportedly applies only to aliens that had “developed substantial connections with this country.” But nothing in Plyler suggests that Texas could exclude from public schools undocumented children who have been in the United States for only a certain limited period of time, and a better reading of Plyler would be that Texas could not do so.
I should also say, at this point, that it’s not clear how Texas’s proposed rule that the Fifth Amendment protects only noncitizens with substantial connections to the United States would apply to this case. Texas asserts that the young woman in the case (and possibly all young women subject to ORR’s policy) would not qualify for Fifth Amendment protections because she was apprehended at the border, and has been in the federal government’s custody ever since.
There are two cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term that would be rather easy to resolve under Texas’s understanding of the Fifth Amendment. One case is Sessions v. Dimaya. The question in Dimaya is whether section 16(b), as incorporated into the Immigration and Nationality Act, is unconstitutionally void for vagueness. The vagueness doctrine is based on the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment (a point Justice Gorsuch took pains to clarify during the oral argument). If noncitizens who lack substantial connections to the United States have no rights under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, then that might resolve Dimaya itself, since we would need findings on the petitioner’s substantial connections to the United States before addressing the Fifth Amendment argument on the merits. It would also mean that section 16(b) could not be unconstitutionally vague when applied to persons without substantial connections to the United States. QED.
The other case is Jennings v. Rodriguez, which will (or will not, since Justice Kagan is now recused) address whether persons who are detained under three immigration statutes have constitutional rights, under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, to bond hearings when they are detained for extended periods of time. If persons without substantial connections to the United States have no rights under the due process, that would resolve some of the issues in/applications of Rodriguez. If persons who lack substantial connections to the United States have no rights under the due process clause, it would also mean that such persons could be detained forever, but that detail concerns the implications of Texas’s view, which brings me to….
Texas purports to evaluate the different positions in Garza by considering their implications. See page 10 (“If on the facts of this case Doe ha a Fifth Amendment right to an abortion, it is hard to imagine why she could be denied any other constitutional rights—such as the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”).
JUSTICE KAGAN: Mr. Stewart, is – is your argument about the new admits, the people who are coming to the border, premised on the idea that they simply have no constitutional rights at all?
MR. STEWART: It is premised on that….
JUSTICE KAGAN: Okay. If it is premised on that, I mean, Justice Scalia in one of his opinions talked about, surely, that -­that can't be right; could we torture those people, could we put those people into forced labor? Surely, the answer to that is no. Is that right?
MR. STEWART: Yeah, I should have been more precise in saying they have no constitutional rights with respect to the determination whether they will be allowed to enter the country.
JUSTICE KAGAN: But if I could just push on Justice Kennedy's question a bit, I mean, for those -- that class of aliens, we are talking about people who have been in this country, who clearly do have various constitutional rights. And are you suggesting that if the backlog is five years, it's okay to keep them there for five years …?
MR. STEWART: I would say that is not unconstitutional….… Let me give you my most extreme answer, and then let me give you a – a backup answer. The most extreme answer is the criminal alien who is detained for more than six months, unlike every other form of detention that are -- is discussed in the briefs, that alien always has the option of terminating the detention by accepting a final order of removal and returning home.
JUSTICE KAGAN: I take it that that's your most extreme answer because it doesn't sound all that good.
The idea that persons who lack substantial connections to the United States have no rights under the due process clause is, indeed, laughable. Could the United States forcibly sterilize those persons if it apprehends them at the border? Could the United States take their organs and donate them to citizens? Could the United States conduct medical experiments on the noncitizen children who were detained in Flores, or keep them in “shackles, chains, [and] barred cells”? Could the United States force women apprehended at the border to have abortions?
On page 3, Texas presents its argument as limited to “the Fifth Amendment’s substantive due process guarantee.” But why would that be the case? The Fifth Amendment protects one group—“persons”; it does not extend one set of protections (those that are procedural in nature) to one group, and another set of protections (those that are substantive in nature) to a different group. It does not extend full-blown substantive protections to one group, and watered-down or laughable versions of substantive protections to a different group. The text refers to “persons” full stop; all of the Fifth Amendment’s protections apply to those persons. If persons without substantial connections to the United States don’t have rights the Fifth Amendment, they don’t have rights under the Fifth Amendment. In any case, the prohibitions on torture and medical experimentation are derived from the *substantive* guarantees of the Fifth Amendment, which are the ones that Texas says do not extend to persons without substantial connections to the United States.
Texas’s argument on the Second Amendment also belies its suggestion that its position about the scope of the Fifth Amendment’s protections is somehow limited to the Fifth Amendment’s substantive guarantees, rather than its procedural ones: If the word “persons” in the Fifth Amendment has to be construed to mean the same thing as the phrase “the people” in the Second Amendment, then surely “persons” under the Fifth Amendment has to be construed to mean the same thing as, well, itself.
Texas has its own offering of word salad; the first heading of its argument section presents this case as the one that will answer whether the young women have a “right to an Abortion on Demand.” What does Texas think constitutes an “abortion on demand”? In this case, it means temporarily releasing a woman from custody so that she can see a doctor and obtain an abortion that she is entitled to receive under state law, and that the government will not pay for. State law in Texas also requires women to jump through a series of hoops before obtaining an abortion, and the women in Garza (at least Jane Doe, who was in Texas) did not seek an exemption from those requirements. It's hardly easy for them to obtain abortions, much less "on demand."
Texas also appears to fear that a ruling against the government would “incentivize even more unlawful entries,” as thousands of young women choose to endanger their lives and leave their homes to unlawfully enter the United States in the hope that they will be apprehended by the United States so that they can insist on the United States releasing them from custody to allow them to obtain an abortion. There is no reason to think that would happen, and Texas provides no reason to think that it would; Plyler v. Doe also rejected the dubious suggestion that requiring Texas to allow undocumented children to enroll in public education would lead to an influx of unauthorized entry. The unfounded fear of persons entering the United States so that they can be apprehended by HHS and obtain an abortion that they will pay for is the extent of Texas’s argument for why a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction is not in the public interest.
To sum things up: Texas’s argument has little to recommend it—not the text, not existing precedent, and not the implications of its position. Texas’s argument, however, has managed to attract one vote thus far—Judge Henderson adopted it when the D.C. Circuit decided not to stay an order of the district court. The other dissenting judges, Judge Kavanaugh and Judge Griffith, wisely chose not to do so. It's not hard to understand why.
I will say this about Texas’s position: Texas’s argument more closely tracks the logic behind the policy that’s at issue in Garza. Texas maintains that the undocumented young women in the case are not “people” (formally, for purposes of the Fifth Amendment). And that is how ORR is treating them—as beings who are not fit, to decide for themselves, what is in their best interests. ORR insists that ORR (and let’s be honest, probably just Scott Lloyd), rather than the women themselves, can decide whether it is in the women’s best interests to have an abortion, and whether it would be better for the women to have the abortion earlier (while still formally in ORR’s custody), or later at some indefinite point in the future (while formally in the custody of some yet undiscovered sponsor). ORR is willing to force these women to delay their abortions, increasing the risks to the women’s health, and also potentially jeopardizing the women’s psychological repose, as they wonder whether they will have to carry their unwanted pregnancies fully to term, and are forced to have later-term abortions.
The insult to these women’s liberty and dignity is dehumanizing; Texas just made that explicit in its choice of argument.
*It’s not entirely clear from Texas’s brief whether it believes that undocumented persons/persons without legal statutes necessarily lack substantial connections to the United States and thus do not have rights under the Fifth Amendment. For example, on page 2, Texas represents that Doe’s concession “that she has ‘no legal immigration status’” resolves whether she has any Fifth Amendment rights. If that’s the relevant detail, then Texas’s position is actually that all persons without legal immigration status have no Fifth Amendment rights. It’s also worth clarifying that Doe “has no legal immigration status” in the sense that she has not been granted legal immigration status; some people who have not been granted legal immigration status are eligible for and may ultimately obtain it, including by receiving asylum in the United States. Doe (and some of the other women subject to the ORR policy) may fall into that category, as they fled various forms of violence and persecution in their home countries. But, as I said, Texas’s position is unclear, as it elsewhere frames its rule as whether “unlawfully present aliens with no ties to the United States” have rights under the Fifth Amendment.

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