Opinion ID: 2994785
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Habeas Corpus Petition

Text: Although Chowdhury has made a valiant effort to explain how his case avoids the strict limits on habeas corpus jurisdiction in the immigration area, we conclude that the district court correctly rejected his claim. (This is a question we review de novo. Selbe v. United States, 130 F.3d 1265, 1266 (7th Cir. 1997).) We start, of course, with the language of the statute, which reads as follows: [N]o court shall have jurisdiction to hear any cause or claim by or on behalf of any alien arising from the decision or action by the Attorney General to commence proceedings, adjudicate cases, or execute removal orders against any alien under this chapter. IIRIRA, sec. 242(g), codified at 18 U.S.C. sec. 1252(g). (This provision, while new, applies to Chowdhury’s case, given our holding that it is fully retroactive. See Lalani v. Perryman, 105 F.3d 334, 336 (7th Cir. 1997).) Chowdhury suggests that his claim does not fit within this prohibition because it arose not from the actions of the Attorney General or the Board, but from the actions of his former attorneys. He argues that claims of ineffective assistance of counsel are common to all proceedings and do not arise from the peculiar nature of immigration proceedings or a decision to execute a deportation order. Nevertheless, at the end of the day Chowdhury was asking the district court to stay the execution of his deportation order, pending a Board decision on his motion to reopen. He was therefore attacking one of the three specific actions over which sec. 1252(g) forecloses review--the execution of a removal order--and was squarely within the jurisdictional bar. See Fedorca v. Perryman, 197 F.3d 236, 239- 40 (7th Cir. 1999). Some circuits have taken the position that sec. 1252(g) does not bar habeas corpus proceedings that were brought under 28 U.S.C. sec. 2241, as Chowdhury’s was. See, e.g., Henderson v. INS, 157 F.3d 106 (2d Cir. 1998); Goncalves v. Reno, 144 F.3d 110 (1st Cir. 1998). This court, however, is not among them--at least not at that broad level of generality. Instead, we have held that sec. 1252(g) forecloses review even over sec. 2241 habeas proceedings. See Yang v. INS, 109 F.3d 1185, 1195 (7th Cir. 1997). The only exception, which was not at issue in Yang, might be for something like the set of rare cases (in the slightly different context of sec. 440(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act) in which we have recognized that an action under sec. 2241 might still be possible notwithstanding similarly forbidding language. See LaGuerre v. Reno, 164 F.3d 1035, 1040 (7th Cir. 1998); Turkhan v. Perryman, 188 F.3d 814, 824 (7th Cir. 1999) (permitting review in a habeas corpus case notwithstanding LaGuerre, under unusual circumstances). This interpretation of sec. 1252(g) and like provisions is consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Reno v. American- Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 525 U.S. 471, 485 (1999), which noted that sec. 1252(g) appeared to be designed to ensure that discretionary determinations would not be made the bases for separate rounds of judicial intervention outside the streamlined process that Congress has designed. It now appears that the Court may have more to say on this general subject soon, as it recently granted certiorari in two cases that present the question whether all jurisdiction to entertain petitions under sec. 2241 was repealed by IIRIRA’s permanent rules. See St. Cyr v. INS, 229 F.3d 406 (2d Cir. 2000), cert. granted, 69 U.S.L.W. 3478 (U.S. Jan. 12, 2001) (No. 00-767); Calcano-Martinez v. INS, 232 F.3d 328 (2d Cir. 2000), cert. granted, 69 U.S.L.W. 3478 (U.S. Jan. 12, 2001) (No. 00-1011). For the present, however, American-Arab is the closest governing authority, and it is to that case we turn. American-Arab definitively rejected the proposition Chowdhury urges, namely, that sec. 1252(g) violates Article III of the Constitution or the separation of powers doctrine, even as applied to habeas corpus petitions. This is not so, the Court found, because the statute still leaves open several avenues of judicial relief, including a timely filed petition for review of the deportation order in the appellate court. Additionally, sec. 1252(g) does not foreclose a petition for habeas corpus directed to matters other than the three discrete actions delineated in sec. 1252(g). Those other points could include, for instance, decisions to open an investigation, to surveil the suspected violator, to reschedule the deportation hearing, to include various provisions in the final order that is the product of the adjudication, and to refuse reconsideration of that order. American-Arab, 525 U.S. at 482. We conclude that this is not one of those rare cases in which we would have to confront the question whether an exception to the normal bar on habeas corpus petitions must be recognized. Nor are we inclined to revisit our own interpretation of the law, although we will obviously be governed by whatever the Supreme Court decides in St. Cyr and Calcano-Martinez, to the extent these rulings bear on these questions. The district court correctly followed the statute and this court’s decisions when it found that it lacked jurisdiction over Chowdhury’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus.