Opinion ID: 166160
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Statutory Validity of the Regulation

Text: 33 We see no reason for holding that the operation of this regulation conflicts with § 1252, which governs court-of-appeals jurisdiction to review orders of removal. Section 1252 makes our jurisdiction to review a final order of removal contingent on the grounds on which that order rests: if the grounds are discretionary, then we lack jurisdiction. 34 Petitioner and Lanza appear to assume that the decision from which jurisdiction is determined must be the decision by the highest tribunal in the hierarchy that considers the matter. Why that must be so is unclear to us. The Attorney General, for whatever reason, may prefer to stand his ground on the decision of the IJ who heard the case rather than the single member of the BIA who reviewed the record. We have already held in Yuk, 355 F.3d at 1230, that the Attorney General's doing so does not violate the administrative-law principles announced in SEC v. Chenery Corp., 332 U.S. 194, 196-97, 67 S.Ct. 1575, 91 L.Ed. 1995 (1947), by depriving us of a reasoned decision to review. 35 To be sure, Petitioner's contention is not the same as Yuk's—the issue here is not the merits of the removal order but our jurisdiction to review it. But if there is no statutory bar to the regulation's requiring that we look to the IJ's decision (rather than the BIA's unexpressed reasons) in reviewing the merits of removal (which is the alien's fundamental concern), we fail to see how the statute bars the regulation from imposing the same requirement when we are determining our jurisdiction. 36 An instructive analogy arises out of Supreme Court practice with respect to jurisdiction to review state-court decisions. The Supreme Court may review state-court decisions interpreting federal law. See 28 U.S.C. § 1257; see also U.S. Const. art. III § 2. But the Supreme Court has long held that it lacks jurisdiction under § 1257 to review a state-court decision that rests on independent and adequate state-law grounds. See Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032, 1037-42, 103 S.Ct. 3469, 77 L.Ed.2d 1201 (1983) (stating current test); Murdock v. City of Memphis, 20 Wall. 590, 87 U.S. 590, 634-36, 22 L.Ed. 429 (1874); Erwin Chemerinsky, Federal Jurisdiction 684-86 (4th ed.2003) (recounting origins of doctrine in Judiciary Act of 1789). When the highest court of a state decides a case on both state- and federal-law grounds and the state-law grounds are independent of the federal-law grounds, the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction. 37 But which state-court decision must rest on independent and adequate state-law grounds? When the state's highest court has issued an opinion, that decision is undoubtedly the relevant one. Occasionally, however, the opinion under review is by a lower court because the state's highest court declined to grant review. In denying review, the high court might have thought the decision correct on state-law grounds only, on federal-law grounds only, or on both, just as the BIA in our case might have affirmed without opinion on discretionary grounds only, on nondiscretionary grounds only, or on both. And, analogously to the situation in our case, the high court's silently letting stand a lower-court decision that rests on state-law grounds because the high court thought there was an alternative federal-law ground for the result reached could be thought to be a circumvention of the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. To fix the problem, just as Petitioner suggests, the Supreme Court might remand such a case to the state's highest court to clarify whether it had denied review because it thought the lower-court decision correct on state-law grounds, or for some other reason. 38 That, however, is not Supreme Court practice; instead, the Court simply reviews the lower-court decision. See Illinois v. Rodriguez, 497 U.S. 177, 180-81, 182, 110 S.Ct. 2793, 111 L.Ed.2d 148 (1990) (Illinois Supreme Court denied petition for leave to appeal from Appellate Court of Illinois; United States Supreme Court looked to Appellate Court's opinion to determine its jurisdiction). In other words, the Supreme Court will decide that it lacks jurisdiction when the lower state court's decision rests on an independent state ground even though the ultimate (unexpressed) ground for the state-court result—the ground on which the state's highest court decided to deny review—was solely a federal-law ground that would confer jurisdiction on the Court had the state court expressed it as the basis for decision. In such a situation, the decision from which jurisdiction is determined is not the decision by the highest tribunal in the hierarchy that considered the matter. 39 A BIA affirmance without opinion is the functional equivalent of a denial of certiorari, because the lower tribunal's decision is the decision of the agency (the counterpart of the state judiciary), and the reasons for affirmance (the counterpart of denial of certiorari) are unknown and unknowable, see Tsegay, 386 F.3d at 1353 (reason for affirming without opinion is unreviewable). The fact that the court denying certiorari may have express criteria for deciding whether to grant certiorari, see N.M. Stat. Ann. § 34-5-14 (grounds for granting certiorari by the New Mexico Supreme Court), does not change the nature of the certiorari decision. 40 We see nothing in the INA that would forbid the Attorney General from establishing an administrative-appeal scheme that included a certiorari-like process for denying review by the BIA. Indeed, as previously noted, the statute contains no reference whatsoever to the BIA or administrative appeals. Even if affirmance without opinion is not formally identical to a certiorari process, its operation is essentially the same and likewise creates no conflict with the statutory scheme. Moreover, to adopt Petitioner's view is tantamount to saying, contrary to our decision in Yuk, that affirmance without opinion is prohibited by the statute. After all, if Petitioner is correct that our jurisdiction must be determined on the basis of the BIA's decision, we could never hear an appeal of a removal hearing without first remanding to the BIA for an explanation of the affirmance, because the BIA may have rested its decision on a nonreviewable ground, even though the IJ's grounds for denial were reviewable.