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FEDERAL COURT UPDATE
American Immigration Lawyers Association v. Reno, Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia 
In this case the court held that the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) could not sue on behalf of people who had been removed from the US under the new removal proceedings created by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA).  Therefore, the court upheld the decision of a lower court dismissing the lawsuit for lack of jurisdiction. 
IIRAIRA instituted new procedures for dealing with people who arrive at a port of entry without proper documentation.  Under it, a person goes through a primary immigration inspection, and if they are not clearly admissible, they are sent to a secondary inspection.  If an immigration inspector determines the person is not admissible, he shall order the person removed.  There is no review of this decision, and a person so removed from the US is barred from reentering for five years.  If, during the primary or secondary inspection, the person indicates an intent to apply for asylum or demonstrates a fear of persecution if returned to their home, they are interviewed by an asylum officer.  If the asylum officer finds there is no credible fear of persecution, he is to order the person removed.  This decision can be reviewed by an Immigration Judge, but the hearing must be held within 7 days.  IIRAIRA limited review of this provision and the regulations implementing it by requiring all challenges to it to be brought within 60 days of its enactment, and to be brought in the District Court of Washington, D.C.
Understanding this decision requires an understanding of the law of standing.  Standing is a judicial concept that requires the parties before the court to have a meaningful stake in the litigation.  It is one of the more intricate areas of law, and one in which court decisions are by no means consistent.  There are many aspects of standing law, one of the most arcane of which, third-party standing, was at issue here.  Third-party standing deals with the situations in which a person (or organization) sues to assert that the rights of another have been injured.  American law has long disfavored the notion of allowing a person to sue on another’s behalf, fearing the party to the suit may not be using the case for completely proper purposes.  However, in recent years cases in which third-party standing is allowed have grown more common.  One of the most important of these was a Supreme Court case finding that a criminal defendant could assert the rights of potential jurors excluded from his case for racially discriminatory reasons.
The court found that “nothing in IIRAIRA supports the idea that Congress intended to allow litigants to assert the rights of others, and there are indications that Congress meant to preclude such suits.”  The statute specifically prohibits class action lawsuits.  To the court, this provision would be rendered ineffective if groups such as AILA were able to assert the rights of, according to the court, “nearly all aliens anywhere in the world who have tried or will try to enter the US.”
Moreover, in the court’s view this case did not meet the requirements of rules on third-party standing.  The traditional view of third-party standing requires that the law complained of interferes with the litigant’s ability to engage in legal conduct with the third-party.  Under this view, if the legal deprivation is of a right that does not protect the relationship between the litigant and the third-party, there is no standing.  According to the court, AILA’s suit was based on the idea that the removal process denied people due process, which, whether true or not, did not impact the relationship between AILA and those people.  The only claimed violation of rights that did impact AILA’s relationship with them was their decreased access to the assistance of an attorney, which the court characterized as a mere “side effect of the expedited removal process.” 
The Supreme Court opinion mentioned earlier took a much broader view of third-party standing, allowing a suit when the party whose rights are at stake cannot bring suit because of some hindrance or obstacle to their assertion of their rights.  The D.C. court did not try to reconcile this with its previously announced narrow view of third-party standing, but did rule that even under this test AILA could bring suit.  Any difficulties potential plaintiffs would have had in filing suit were either purposefully imposed by Congress or were to be expected in any lawsuit, and thus were not the sort the Supreme Court found could be the basis for third-party standing.
Because AILA lacked standing to sue, its case was dismissed.  One of the results of this is that the new removal proceedings created by IIRAIRA will not be reviewed by a federal court to ensure that they are constitutional. 
 
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Camarena v. Meissner, Northern District of California 
In this case the court ruled that the INS decision to not renew the plaintiffs applications for extension of voluntary departure and employment authorization under the family unity program to be an abuse of discretion.  Therefore, the judge ordered the INS to process the applications.
The family unity program was enacted as part of the Immigration Act of 1990.  Under this program, a person who lived in the US before December 1, 1988 and was here on that day, and is the spouse or unmarried child of a legalized alien may not be removed from the US and must be granted employment authorization.  If a family unity application is approved, the applicant is given voluntary departure for two years, and employment authorization.  If an applicant is eligible, family unity benefits are mandatory – the INS does not have the discretion to withhold them. 
The plaintiffs are a family, the father of which had been legalized.  In 1996, his wife and son sought benefits under the family unity program.  Shortly thereafter the applications were approved.  After two years, in 1998, the family applied for an extension of benefits.  Family unity benefits are to be extended if the applicant submits evidence of continued eligibility – the applicant does not need to resubmit evidence sent in with the initial application.  Although the family submitted evidence to show their continued eligibility, the INS denied the application. 
The basis for the INS denial was its determination that the Camarena’s had not been in the US during the requisite time, based on an I-130 petition filed by the father in 1992.  In this petition he claimed that his wife and son resided in Mexico and had never been to the US.  According to the INS, this meant they were not eligible for family unity benefits.  The court disagreed.
There were two primary bases for the court’s ruling.  First, the 1992 I-130 was not as persuasive as the voluminous evidence presented to document the presence of all three plaintiffs in the US since 1988.  Camerena said he filled in the form that way to avoid the possibility of the deportation of his wife and child.  Second, in 1996 the INS had determined that the plaintiffs met the presence requirements for family unity benefits, and in 1998 reversed this finding on the basis of evidence (the I-130 petition) that was shown to be false.  Because there was not substantial evidence to support the INS’s ruling denying family unity benefits, the ruling was an abuse of discretion.  The judge ordered the INS to grant the plaintiffs’ applications for continued voluntary departure and employment authorization, and to refrain from beginning deportation proceedings while the applications are processed.