Law Commons^™

Illegal Emigration: The Continuing Life Of Invalid Deportation Orders, Richard Frankel

Richard H. Frankel

Federal appeals courts overturn more than one thousand deportation orders every year. A significant number of those reversals involve non-citizens who are abroad because they have been deported as a result of losing their cases at the administrative level. Although an order overturning a deportation order ordinarily restores non-citizens to their prior status of being lawfully present in the United States, federal immigration authorities have used the fact of the non-citizen’s now-invalidated deportation to subject such non-citizens to a new and previously inapplicable set of standards that effectively prevents them from returning. Under this practice, non-citizens who seek to return …