Opinion ID: 205743
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Settled Expectation of Availability of Section 212(c) Relief

Text: Under pre-1996 immigration law, the Attorney General had broad discretion to grant relief to aliens who were deportable due to criminal convictions. See St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 294-295, 121 S.Ct. 2271. This relief was provided by § 212(c) of the INA, as then codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1182(c), which stated: Aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence who temporarily proceeded abroad voluntarily and not under an order of deportation, and who are returning to a lawful unrelinquished domicile of seven consecutive years, may be admitted in the discretion of the Attorney General. 8 U.S.C. § 1182(c) (1990) (repealed 1996). Although literally only applicable to exclusion proceedings, the BIA also provided § 212(c) relief in deportation proceedings to permanent residents with unrelinquished domicile of seven consecutive years. See St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 295, 121 S.Ct. 2271 (quoting Matter of Silva, 16 I. & N. Dec. 26, 30 (BIA 1976)); 8 C.F.R. § 1212.3; cf. Abebe v. Mukasey, 554 F.3d 1203, 1207 (9th Cir.2009) (en banc) (nothing we say today casts any doubt on [8 C.F.R. § 1212.3]). Prior to 1996, § 212(c) relief was unavailable only to aggravated felons who had served a term of imprisonment of at least five years. See St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 297, 121 S.Ct. 2271 (citing 104 Stat. 5052). Access to § 212(c) relief was important to aliens with criminal convictions because IJs and the BIA granted over half of the applications for relief. Id. at 296 n. 5, 121 S.Ct. 2271. In 1996, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and then passed IIRIRA. Section 440(d) of AEDPA narrowed the availability of § 212(c) relief. See St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 297, 121 S.Ct. 2271 (citing 110 Stat. 1277). IIRIRA repealed § 212(c) altogether and replaced it with cancellation of removal, which provides relief to a narrower class of removable aliens. Id. (citing 110 Stat. 3009-597). In St. Cyr, the Supreme Court addressed the question of whether IIRIRA applied retroactively to deny § 212(c) relief to aliens who had, before the passage of AEDPA and IIRIRA, pled guilty to offenses making them deportable (or, in the language of IIRIRA, removable). St. Cyr was a Haitian national who became a lawful permanent resident in 1986. Id. at 293, 121 S.Ct. 2271. Ten years later, before Congress passed AEDPA or IIRIRA, he pled guilty to a deportable offense. Id. Removal proceedings were begun after the passage of both statutes. The government argued that the Attorney General no longer had the power to grant § 212(c) relief. Id. The Court held that St. Cyr was eligible for § 212(c) relief despite the repeal of § 212(c) by IIRIRA. Applying the two-step retroactivity analysis in Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U.S. 244, 114 S.Ct. 1483, 128 L.Ed.2d 229 (1994), the Court held (1) that IIRIRA is ambiguous regarding retroactivity, St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 314-320, 121 S.Ct. 2271; and (2) that application of IIRIRA to aliens who pled guilty before its passage has an impermissible retroactive effect. Id. at 320-26, 121 S.Ct. 2271. The Court reasoned that aliens were well aware of the immigration consequences of criminal convictions and thus relied on the possibility of obtaining § 212(c) relief when they agreed to plead guilty. Id. at 325, 121 S.Ct. 2271. The Court wrote that without clear Congressional intent, courts will not read a statute to violate the reasonable reliance[ ] and settled expectations of access to § 212(c) relief that informed the aliens' decisions to plead guilty. Id. at 321, 121 S.Ct. 2271 (quotations omitted). The Court held that § 212(c) relief remains available for aliens, like respondent, whose convictions were obtained through plea agreements and who, notwithstanding those convictions, would have been eligible for § 212(c) relief at the time of their plea under the law then in effect. Id. at 326, 121 S.Ct. 2271. When St. Cyr pled guilty, his plea made him immediately deportable. His reliance at the time of his plea on the availability of relief under § 212(c) was therefore evident. But we have held that an alien does not need to have been immediately deportable at the time of his or her plea to benefit from the reliance interest articulated in St. Cyr. In United States v. Leon-Paz, 340 F.3d 1003 (9th Cir.2003), the petitioner had entered the United States as a special agricultural worker in 1988 with lawful temporary resident status. Like Gallegos-Vasquez, he automatically adjusted to lawful permanent resident status in late 1990. He pled guilty to burglary in 1995 and was sentenced to four years in state prison. When Leon-Paz pled guilty in 1995, his burglary conviction did not render him deportable because his four-year sentence was insufficient to render his crime an aggravated felony for immigration purposes. Id. at 1005. He was therefore not eligible for § 212(c) relief at that time because he was not then deportable. The government instituted removal proceedings against him in 1997, after the passage of AEDPA and IIRIRA. As a result of those statutes, his burglary conviction now made him removable. The IJ advised him in his removal proceedings that he was not eligible for relief under § 212(c). We disagreed with the IJ's advice, holding that Leon-Paz was eligible for § 212(c) relief in that proceeding. We wrote: While it is true that in 1995 Leon did not actually plead to what was an aggravated felony, whereas St. Cyr had done so, it is also true that Leon had two bulwarks to protect himself against attacks on his residence in this country. The first was the fact that he had pled to a crime that was below the aggravated felony threshold, and the second was § 212(c) itself in case the definition of aggravated felony changed as it often had and has. Id. at 1006. AEDPA took down the first bulwark by providing that § 212(c) was not available to aggravated felons. IIRIRA took down the second bulwark by changing the definition of aggravated felony from a crime in which the sentence was at least five years to one in which the sentence was at least one year, and by replacing § 212(c) with cancellation of removal. The combination of AEDPA and IIRIRA made Leon-Paz removable. Once he was removable, the protection of § 212(c) became critically important. However, we wrote that even at the time of his plea Leon-Paz could rely on the fact that he had a source of protection should his crime be declared an aggravated felony in the future. He, like St. Cyr, was entitled to the continued protection of § 212(c). Id. at 1007. In July 1989, Gallegos-Vasquez pled guilty to the misdemeanor of taking a vehicle without consent or vehicle theft. The plea had two consequences. First, because the vehicle conviction was Gallegos-Vasquez's second conviction for a crime involving moral turpitude, he was immediately removable under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(ii). Second, because the vehicle conviction was his third misdemeanor conviction, the Attorney General now had discretionary authority to terminate his lawful temporary resident status. 8 U.S.C. § 1160(a)(3)(B)(ii). At the time of his plea, Gallegos-Vasquez was not immediately eligible for § 212(c) relief. He was not a lawful permanent resident, though he would automatically become one at the end of 1990 if the Attorney General did not choose to exercise his authority to terminate his lawful temporary status. He also had not yet achieved an unrelinquished domicile of seven years in the United States, though he would do so in 1994. Thus, at the time of his plea, he could anticipate that if the Attorney General refrained from acting until the end of 1990, and if he stayed in the United States until 1994, he would become eligible for § 212(c) relief. Gallegos-Vasquez is in the same position as the petitioner in Perez-Enriquez v. Gonzales, 463 F.3d 1007 (9th Cir.2006) (en banc). Perez-Enriquez was admitted to the United States in 1988 as a lawful temporary resident under the SAW program. He pled guilty to a deportable drug offense in 1989, before he achieved lawful permanent resident status and before he achieved seven years of unrelinquished domicile. The Attorney General did not choose to exercise his authority to terminate Perez-Enriquez's lawful temporary resident status, although he had the power to do so. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1160(a)(3)(B)(ii) (Attorney General can deny adjustment to permanent status if alien commits act that makes alien inadmissible), 1182(a)(2)(A)(i)(II) (alien who has committed offense relating to controlled substance inadmissible). Perez-Enriquez automatically adjusted to lawful permanent resident status on December 1, 1990. He achieved seven years of unrelinquished domicile in 1995. The government initiated removal proceedings against him in 2001. The question directly before us was not the availability of relief under § 212(c). Rather, the question was whether Perez-Enriquez's date of admissibility was the date of his admission as a lawful temporary resident or the date of his adjustment to lawful permanent resident status. But at stake in the question was whether Perez-Enriquez would be treated in the removal proceedings as a lawful temporary or a lawful permanent resident. The distinction mattered because if Perez-Enriquez was a lawful permanent resident, he could apply for relief under § 212(c). We wrote that if Perez-Enriquez were a lawful permanent resident, then the relevant protection is that provided by Section 212(c) and St. Cyr because he pled guilty to his drug offense in 1989, prior to the adoption of three statutes limiting the availability of relief under Section 212(c). Id. at 1011. We held that Perez-Enriquez was a lawful permanent resident, which meant that he was entitled to § 212(c) relief. Like Perez-Enriquez, Gallegos-Vasquez was admitted as a lawful temporary resident in the late 1980s. Also like Perez-Enriquez, Gallegos-Vasquez pled guilty to a deportable offense in 1989, before he had adjusted to lawful permanent status and before he had achieved seven years of unrelinquished domicile. We conclude that Gallegos-Vasquez, like Perez-Enriquez, had a settled expectation of the availability of § 212(c) relief at the time he pled guilty to his deportable offense in September 1989. The government makes two arguments against this conclusion. First, the government argues that the fact that Gallegos-Vasquez was not a lawful permanent resident at the time he pled guilty is itself sufficient to deprive him of a settled expectation under St. Cyr. This argument, however, is in effect the same argument we rejected in Leon-Paz that because Gallegos-Vasquez's guilty plea did not make him immediately eligible for § 212(c) relief he did not have a settled expectation of the availability of such relief. Second, the government argues that because Gallegos-Vasquez's third misdemeanor conviction gave the Attorney General the discretionary authority to terminate his temporary resident status, he could not have had a settled expectation that he would become a lawful permanent resident and thus become eligible for § 212(c) relief. The fact that Gallegos-Vasquez's adjustment to lawful permanent resident status was subject to the Attorney General's discretion, however, does not mean that he could not have had a settled expectation of the likelihood of adjustment to such status and thus the availability of § 212(c) relief. As the Supreme Court explained in St. Cyr, There is a clear difference, for the purposes of retroactivity analysis, between facing possible deportation and facing certain deportation. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 325, 121 S.Ct. 2271. Gallegos-Vasquez pled guilty in 1989 based on the reasonable (and ultimately realized) expectation that the Attorney General would not decide to terminate his temporary resident status, and that § 212(c) relief would be available if he achieved seven years of unrelinquished residence. Had Gallegos-Vasquez faced the certainty that § 212(c) relief would not be available, he may well have elected to force the government to go to trial. See St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 325, 121 S.Ct. 2271 (Because respondent, and other aliens like him, almost certainly relied upon that likelihood [of § 212(c) relief] in deciding whether to forgo their right to a trial, the elimination of any possibility of § 212(c) relief by IIRIRA has an obvious and severe retroactive effect.). We therefore hold that Gallegos-Vasquez had a settled expectation, within the meaning of St. Cyr, of the availability of § 212(c) relief when he pled guilty to the vehicle misdemeanor in September 1989.