Supreme Court rules against illegal immigrants fighting deportation hearings

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled 5-4 that the U.S. government properly notified three illegal immigrants about their deportation hearings. Federal law requires the government to provide such immigrants with notices to appear, or NTAs, for their deportation hearings. Illegal immigrants who don’t arrive for their hearings are automatically deported.

What happened in Campos-Chaves v. Garland? Moris Campos-Chaves is a citizen of El Salvador who illegally entered the U.S. back in 2005. The government provided Campos-Chaves and two other men, all illegal immigrants, with initial NTAs that did not contain a place or time to appear. Then, the government provided them with updated notices containing information about the time and place of the hearing. The men argued that authorities could not deport them since they had not received information about the date and time of their hearings in both notices. But the Supreme Court ruled Friday that the men had received proper notice because they’d received an updated notice containing the information about the time and place. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett sided with the government. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Neil Gorsuch, and Elena Kagan sided with the immigrants.

Dig deeper: Listen to Mary Reichard and Nick Eicher’s report on The World and Everything in It podcast describing the details of the arguments the court heard before making its decision.