Opinion ID: 482845
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: the refugee act

Text: 69 The appellants' flagship asseveration is that detention in the circumstances of these cases, pursuant to the 1982 regulations, impermissibly suppresses their rights to seek political asylum under the Refugee Act of 1980, Pub.L. No. 96-212, 94 Stat. 102 (1980). Perscrutation of the Refugee Act and its legislative history, however, dispels any reasonable doubt on this score. Neither the district director's discretionary decisions under the INS regulations, nor the regulations themselves, are in any way interdicted by, or inconsistent with, the provisions of the Refugee Act.
70 In a nation built upon the bountiful fruits of wave after wave of immigration, it is surprising to find how little national attention had been focused on the development of an overall refugee program. In the culmination of a massive and long-standing effort to remedy this deficiency, Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980. In so doing, a comprehensive refugee resettlement and assistance policy was established for the first time. S.Rep. No. 256, 96th Cong., 2d Sess. 1, reprinted in 1980 U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 141. There were several aspects to this legislation. It embodied a new--and more expansive--meaning of the term refugee, conforming to the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Id. at 154-55. For example, displaced persons and political prisoners were included within the broadened definition. Id. The Refugee Act also increased the annual limitation on regular admissions and created a streamlined procedure for dealing with emergency situations. Id. at 142. The bill established a consultation process and provided significant federal support for resettlement. Id. Each and all of these objectives may validly be viewed as having liberalized preexisting strictures. 71 Yet, there was plainly another (coequal) purpose of the Refugee Act: to eliminate the Attorney General's use of his parole authority as a regularly-travelled alternate route for entry into the United States. See INS v. Stevic, 467 U.S. 407, 425, 104 S.Ct. 2489, 2498, 81 L.Ed.2d 321 (1984) (the primary substantive change Congress intended to make under the Refugee Act ... was to eliminate the piecemeal approach to admission of refugees previously existing under Sec. 203(a)(7) and Sec. 212(d)(5) [8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5) ]); Kashani v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 793 F.2d 818, 825-27 (7th Cir.1986) (same). See also 1 Gordon & Rosenfield, supra, Sec. 2.24Aa. The role of the bill was authoritatively described in this way: 72 [I]t places into law what we do for refugees now by custom, and on an ad hoc basis, through the use of the parole authority in Section 212(d)(5) [8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5) ] of the Immigration and Nationality Act. 73 S.Rep. No. 256, supra, 1980 U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News at 141. 74 The Refugee Act was intended to provide a procedure which would minimize the Attorney General's need to utilize his parole power as an informal vehicle to assure the admission of refugees. This aspect of the legislation was implemented through an addition to the parole statute, viz., 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5)(B) (1982). Although the appellants do not appear to claim a right to parole based on Sec. 1182(d)(5)(B), its addition to the parole statute as part of the Refugee Act, together with the concomitant legislative history, inform our understanding of the parliamentary will with regard to the former parole statute, now Sec. 1182(d)(5)(A). The furlough provision added by the Refugee Act explicitly limited the Attorney General's authority in granting parole thereunder to refugees. The statute intoned: 75 [T]he Attorney General may not parole into the United States an alien who is a refugee unless the Attorney General determines that compelling reasons in the public interest with respect to that particular alien require that the alien be paroled into the United States rather than be admitted as a refugee under section 1157 of this title. 76 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5)(B) (emphasis supplied). 77 Although this amendment plainly restricted the Attorney General's powers under Sec. 1182(d)(5) with regard to refugees, the pertinent archives of both the Senate and House reflected an unambiguous wish to have that the parole authority stay exactly as it was vis-a-vis nonrefugee aliens. There is little room for guesswork as to the legislative intent. The Senate report, for instance, stated flatly that [t]he Attorney General's parole authority under Section 212(d)(5) [8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5) ] of the Immigration and Nationality Act remains unchanged. S.Rep. No. 256, supra, reprinted in 1980 U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News at 157. The House Conference Report was equally direct: it acknowledged that the amendment did not affect the Attorney General's authority under section 212(d)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to parole aliens who are not deemed to be refugees. H.R.Rep. No. 781, 96th Cong., 2d Sess. 20, reprinted in 1980 U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 160, 162. 78 The only conclusion which can sensibly be drawn from the incorporation of Sec. 1182(d)(5)(B) into the statute is that Congress was attempting to restore the parole authority to the narrow uses for which it was originally intended, that is, for emergent reasons or for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest, 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5)(A), and not to perpetuate--or further encourage--its employment as a discretionary floodgate for the admission of an alien tide. 79 Beyond arguing by implication, the appellants point specifically to the provisions of the Refugee Act of 1980 dealing with applications for asylum. Congress, for the first time, sought to engraft an asylum stipulation onto the immigration laws in order to ameliorate the arrangement for processing sanctuary claims sponsored by aliens who had actually arrived in the United States. S.Rep. No. 256, supra, reprinted in 1980 U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News at 149. To accomplish this end, Congress directed the Attorney General to structure an application system along the following lines: 80 The Attorney General shall establish a procedure for an alien physically present in the United States or at a land border or port of entry, irrespective of such alien's status, to apply for asylum, and the alien may be granted asylum in the discretion of the Attorney General if the Attorney General determines that such alien is a refugee.... 81 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1158(a) (1982). 82 The statute not only leaves the decision of whether to grant safe harbor in the first place to the discretion of the Attorney General, id., but also gives him the same wide authority in bringing asylum status to an end, that is, the Attorney General may withdraw the privilege whenever, in his discretion, he determines that the alien is no longer a refugee.... 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1158(b). The statute neither enlarged an alien's eligibility for asylum nor vested in him rights which were previously denied. It merely directed the establishment of a mechanism to handle asylum applications tendered by aliens physically present. Once that directive was accommodated--and the Attorney General did so when he promulgated detailed regulations setting forth procedures for such asylum applications, see 8 C.F.R. Secs. 208.1-208.16--there remained few restrictions on administrative decisionmaking. 83 The Refugee Act of 1980 is completely silent on the parole issue vis-a-vis asylum seekers. If Congress had wanted all such applicants to be paroled, or had favored a presumption of parole eligibility, or had been inclined to vary the exercise of the Attorney General's parole authority with regard to asylum aspirants, Congress could (and doubtless would) have enacted such a rider. In this wise, the combination of the absence of any such provision, coupled with the Congress's explicit statements that the Attorney General's parole power under 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5)(A) was not to change, leaves no doubt that the executive branch's discretion to grant or refuse parole with respect to asylum seekers survived the passage of the Refugee Act intact. 84 To sum up, there are clear indicia of a congressional desire to discourage any extravagant--or even generous--use of the Attorney General's parole authority in connection with both nonrefugee and refugee aliens. The statutory scheme and the annals of the Congress manifest a design to restrict the employment of parole within close confines. The Refugee Act itself was meant to provide an orderly system for the admission of refugees that would replace the erratic, ofttimes improvident, use of the Attorney General's parole authority for the same purpose. It makes little sense to argue that a statute constructed to reduce both the haphazardness and the incidence of parole actually conferred what amounted to a right to insist upon parole coincident with the filing of any asylum application. 85 The Refugee Act of 1980 cannot sensibly be heard as a clarion call to parole on demand. Yet it is just this result that the appellants would have us reach--for if we were to hold that the district director's decision to deny parole impliedly conflicts with the right to apply for asylum, then it would follow, as the night the day, that every asylum applicant who deigns to ask must be furloughed. The application itself, without more, would trigger automatic parole and free access to America. Such a holding would lend encouragement to end runs around the punctilious methodology of the Refugee Act. Moreover, it would contravene the existing statutes and their legislative history. In the bargain it would work a de facto repeal of the sweeping discretionary authority long enjoyed by the Attorney General in the immigration field. Congress could not have intended to breach the nation's borders in such tergiversant fashion. 86 For these reasons, the appellants' contention that the facially legitimate denial of parole somehow contradicts their statutory right to apply for asylum is baseless. Entitlement to asylum (or, more accurately, to the opportunity to solicit asylum) is wholly separate from, and entirely independent of, the Attorney General's statutory authority to afford or refuse parole. The appellants have received their chance to apply for asylum, and they have pursued this prerogative to its fullest. Indeed, they continue to exercise this right by prosecuting their appeals from the decisions of the administrative law judges who have uniformly recommended that they be denied asylum and deported. Even if these decisions stand, the appellants will have other avenues open to them. Under internal guidelines adopted June 27, 1983, the INS may again consider parole for these Afghanistanis after final deportation orders have been entered in the asylum proceedings. If exclusion is eventually decreed, but there are difficulties in enforcing departures (for example, if India or Pakistan refuse to readmit a petitioner), then 87 aliens detained in exclusion proceedings for more than thirty days after a request for travel facilities to the Department of State, and in whose cases a final order has been entered, may be considered for parole.... 88 See INS Detention Policy Guidelines in Exclusion Cases, June 27, 1983. 8 89 Absent emergent reasons or the like, see 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5)(A), nothing in the law mandates the appellants' release on parole pending a final resolution of their asylum requests--and nothing in the record before us suggests that they are entitled to such indulgence.
90 Reconcilation of the provisions of the Refugee Act and of the parole statute in this commonsense manner does not, however, end this phase of our inquiry. The petitioners offer several other supposed bases upon which they claim that the Refugee Act undercuts the legality of their continued detention. Some of these theories merit added comment. 91 The appellants argue at length that the INS, whatever its stated reasons for detaining asylum applicants, is in reality employing quarantine as a form of coercion in an impermissible attempt to force asylum seekers to abandon the prosecution of their applications. In their view, such coercion countermands the aims and entitlements of the Refugee Act, is punitive in its essence, and is fundamentally unfair to boot. But, this argument topples of its own weight. As we have mentioned repeatedly, the intention of the government is to protect our shores against a wave of itinerant asylum seekers bent on circumventing the coherent scheme of the Refugee Act, not to punish aliens for seeking asylum. 92 These cases testify eloquently to the core element of the problem. After all, these four petitioners were detained before they became applicants for asylum. Moreover, if they had resorted not to self-help, but to the regular procedures envisioned by the Refugee Act itself, their applications for admission would have been considered without the occasion or the need for any interim detention. Seen in this light, the plea that the appellants are being punished rings hollow. They have, at all times, had the option to return to the countries which they used as springboards in their efforts to reach the United States. 9 They were detained only when the government was forced, by their voluntary actions, to exercise its conceded authority to hold them pending inspection of their bona fides. Just as the disability of pretrial detention does not amount to punishment in the constitutional sense, Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 537-39, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 1873-74, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979), neither does the disability incident to the justifiable temporary detention of excludable aliens. Cf. Doe v. Gaughan, 808 F.2d 871, 879 n. 9 (1st Cir.1986) (in civil commitment context, often restrictions on freedom may resemble punishment, but that mere resemblance does not equate to ... unconstitutionally inflicted punishment). 93 Next the appellants assert that, even in the absence of some express statutory conflict, the 1982 INS regulations violate the Refugee Act of 1980 by attempting in a thinly-veiled way impermissibly to curtail asylum applications. This ipse dixit, too, is devoid of any substance. On their face, the regulations are valid. The Attorney General has been ceded authority by Congress--authority which he has properly delegated to the INS--to publish such regulations as he deems necessary to enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act. 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1103 (1982); see also 8 C.F.R. Sec. 2.1 (1986). Both the detention regulations, 8 C.F.R. Sec. 235.3, and the parole regulations, 8 C.F.R. Sec. 212.5, were enacted under the clearest statutory claim of right. See 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1225(b) (1982) and 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1182(d)(5) (1982), respectively. 94 For aught that appears of record, the INS has promulgated its regulations in apparent compliance with the imperatives of the Administrative Procedure Act. Jean v. Nelson, 727 F.2d at 962; Ishtyaq, 627 F.Supp. at 22. See also 8 C.F.R. Secs. 212.5, 235.5; 47 Fed.Reg. 30,044 (proposed July 9, 1982), as amended, 47 Fed.Reg. 46,493 (Oct. 19, 1982). These regulations speak, loudly and distinctly, for themselves: their purport was not to curb asylum applications, but to secure this country's borders against a large flow of illegal immigrants (many of whom might not qualify for either refugee or asylum status). See 47 Fed.Reg. 30,044, supra. Even upon the most searching scrutiny, no impropriety appears. 95 The detention of undocumented or fraudulently documented aliens, with parole possible only in the Attorney General's discretion, undoubtedly discourages some aliens from trying to circumvent the orderly procedures of the Refugee Act. Yet, this is not the unmitigated evil which the appellants envision. Far from undermining the Refugee Act, the INS regulations encourage compliance with the immigration laws and deter attempts to evade those laws. Asylum, which remains available to proper applicants (as determined by Congress and the Attorney General), is limited only insofar as persons might desire to employ it as a device to avoid the normal application process in an at-all-costs effort to achieve immigrant status. Neither the discretionary denial of parole nor the 1982 INS regulations transgress the letter (or for that matter, the spirit) of the Refugee Act of 1980. This aspect of the petitioners' challenge is unavailing. 96 It is unnecessary for us to consider the appellants' remaining contentions with regard to the Refugee Act. Those arguments are either subsumed in the foregoing or are so jejune that they do not warrant discussion. 10