Opinion ID: 4521048
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Plaintiff’s Treaty-Based Claims

Text: Plaintiff’s complaint alleges that his separation from his father pursuant to the removal order violates the principles of international treaties, including The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the “Declaration”); the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (the “ICESCR”); and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (the “CRC”). The district court correctly found that it did not have subject matter jurisdiction over Plaintiff’s treaty-based claims because none of these treaties create a judicially-enforceable cause of action. See, e.g., Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 576 (2005) (stating that the United States has not ratified the CRC); Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U.S. 692, 734 (2004) (“[T]he Declaration does not of its own force impose obligations as a matter of international law.”); Rose v. Borsos, No. 2:17-CV-204, 2018 WL 3967673, at  (E.D. Tenn. Aug. 17, 2018) (holding that the ICESCR is not self-executing (collecting cases)). On appeal, Plaintiff concedes that these treaties are not self-executing but argues that the district court should have taken them into account in order to “consider fully the context in which its decisions are made on issues as sensitive as family unity and the rights of children.” (Appellant’s Reply Br. at 2.) However, Plaintiff has not alleged in what way any of these treaties’ principles were supposedly abridged by his father’s valid removal, and it is not clear to us that they were. Cf. Bamaca-Perez v. Lynch, 670 F. App’x 892, 893 (6th Cir. 2016) (per No. 19-3716 Cooper Butt v. Barr, et al. Page 5 curiam) (rejecting a parent’s treaty-based challenge to the standard governing hardship determinations in a cancellation-of-removal case because the immigration courts’ “entire inquiry focuses on the qualifying children, making their interests a ‘primary consideration’ in the cancellation-of-removal analysis” (quoting Cabrera-Alvarez v. Gonzales, 423 F.3d 1006, 1012 (9th Cir. 2005))). Therefore, the district court properly dismissed Plaintiff’s treaty-based claims.