Robert Barnes writes in the Washington Post:
“Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said Wednesday he had grave worries about “prosecutorial abuse” if even a minor lie in the application process means the government can later strip a naturalized immigrant of her citizenship.
As the issues of immigration and deportation take center stage under the Trump administration, Roberts and other Supreme Court justices seemed hesitant to give the government unfettered power to remove naturalized citizens from the country.
The case involved a Bosnian native, Divna Maslenjak, who was criminally prosecuted for lying on her application about her husband’s military service. She was deported by the Obama administration, which held the broad view that any misrepresentation — whether relevant or not — was enough to give the government the right to consider revocation.
“It is troublesome to give that extraordinary power, which, essentially, is unlimited power, at least in most cases, to the government,” Roberts said. Because it would be easy in almost all cases to find some falsehood, the chief justice said, “the government will have the opportunity to denaturalize anyone they want.”
Roberts, who regularly warns about the discretionary power of prosecutors, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy added a moment of drama to a lively hearing that was the Supreme Court’s last scheduled oral argument of the term.
They were not persuaded by Justice Department lawyer Robert A. Parker’s assertion that other safeguards are built into the system and that government lawyers had little reason to search through the millions of files of naturalized citizens to find trivial reasons to prosecute. Even denaturalization, Parker said, only returns a person to the status of lawful permanent resident and allows reapplication.
. . . .
Some justices noted that the statute does not specifically require that. “It seems like, linguistically, we have to do some somersaults to get where you want to go,” said Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who testified during his recent confirmation hearings about sticking closely to the text of statutes.
And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Maslenjak’s misrepresentations appeared directly relevant to her application. She lied about what her husband was doing in Bosnia, Ginsburg said. “Under what circumstances would that be immaterial?”
. . . .
The case is Maslenjak v. United States.”
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PWS
04-26-17