Ginsburg Writes UNANIMOUS Supreme Court Opinion Overturning the 9th Circuit In Illegal Immigration Case

Democrats often like to bash the Supreme Court as politicized after Trump was able to successfully appoint two justices.

However, the ruling was unanimous and Ginsberg, the liberal firebrand, rebuked the 9th Circuit Panel.

According to the National Law Journal:

In an opinion Thursday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking for a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court, had unusually harsh criticism of a federal appellate panel for a practice that some court experts say the justices often embrace themselves.

Violation of the “party presentation” principle—central to Thursday’s ruling—is not often the basis for deciding a high court case. The principle refers to the long-standing feature of the court system that the parties involved in litigation, and not judges, are responsible for raising the legal issues a court must resolve.
That principle rarely appears in a Supreme Court decision, and the ruling was all the more remarkable that its author—Ginsburg—rebuked a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in accusatory terms that said the court’s “transformation” of a case went “well beyond the pale.”

Ginsburg’s opinion was in the case United States v. Sineneng-Smith. Evelyn Sineneng-Smith, who operated an immigration consulting firm in San Jose, California, was convicted of violating a federal law making it a felony to “encourage or induce an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.”

Sineneng-Smith helped undocumented immigrants apply for labor certification even though she knew they did not meet the application-filing deadline. For her services, she collected more than $3.3 million from them between 2001 and 2008. In appealing her conviction, her attorney raised the same arguments presented to the district court, but then her appeal moved “onto a different track,” according to Ginsburg.

“Instead of adjudicating the case presented by the parties, the appeals court named three amici and invited them to brief and argue issues framed by the panel, including a question Sineneng-Smith herself never raised earlier: ‘Whether the statute of conviction is overbroad … under the First Amendment,’” Ginsburg wrote.

Lawyers for the parties to the appeal were assigned a secondary role, Ginsburg said. The three amici appointed to brief and argue were the circuit’s Federal Defender Organizations (as a group), the Immigrant Defense Project, and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. The panel identified three issues for the briefing and gave amici 20 minutes to argue and 10 minutes to Sineneng-Smith’s counsel.

“The party presentation principle is supple, not ironclad,” Ginsburg wrote. “There are no doubt circumstances in which a modest initiating role for a court is appropriate. But this case scarcely fits that bill.”

Although a court is not “hide-bound” by a party’s counsel’s precise arguments, Ginsburg said “the Ninth Circuit’s radical transformation of this case goes well beyond the pale.” The Ninth Circuit’s judgment was vacated and the case remanded “for reconsideration shorn of the overbreadth inquiry interjected by the appellate panel and bearing a fair resemblance to the case shaped by the parties.”

The court, in another unusual move, issued an addendum identifying cases from 2015 to 2020 in which the justices called for supplemental briefing or appointed an amicus curiae. Ginsburg, in a footnote, wrote: “None of them bear any resemblance to the redirection ordered by the Ninth Circuit panel in this case.”

In the addendum, the court highlighted cases where it sought supplemental briefing to decide whether a controversy existed to support review in the first place; to determine whether a case could be resolved more narrowly than the question presented; and whether a constitutional issue was implicated by the question presented, among other reasons.

Not only did the Supreme Court contradict the appeals court's decisions, they blasted the judges for "drastically" straying from judicial norms.

If President Trump had said this, it would have fallen on deaf ears.

But will liberals and their allies in the media agree with Justice Ginsberg's written opinion?

It is illegal -- a crime -- to encourage illegal aliens to remain in the United States unlawfully.

The Supreme Court's ruling brings a close to a case that has been open for almost a decade.

The Daily Caller has more details on the case itself:

A grand jury indicted California immigration consultant Evelyn Sineneng-Smith in 2010 for multiple violations of anti-harboring laws, which make it a felony to “encourag[e] or induc[e] an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.”

Sineneng-Smith encouraged illegal alien clients to apply for a certification that would allow them to remain legally in the country, despite them not qualifying for the certification, according to the indictment. She would charge her clients a fee for this service, and allegedly made millions off of the scheme.

Sineneng-Smith earned more than $3.3 million off of her clients, legal affairs outlet Jurist reported.

In a challenge to the decision, Sineneng-Smith argued that the law violated her right to free speech. The Ninth Circuit reversed her conviction, finding that the entire law was invalid as an over broad restriction of speech.

The Ninth Circuit’s reversal however, was not based on arguments presented by her defense, but by third party arguments submitted to the panel of judges.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Ninth Circuit overstepped its authority by injecting an argument not made by the defendant herself. The decision ultimately reaffirms that parties — not the courts — shape issues in a court case.

The case is now to be sent back to the Ninth Circuit “for reconsideration … bearing a fair resemblance to the case shaped by parties.”

The decision was hailed by immigration hawks.

“We applaud the Court’s well-reasoned decision,” Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of Immigration Reform Law Institute, said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the Court did not have to reach the issue of whether this important statute is constitutional, but it did keep the law in place. When and if the overbreadth issue is brought up properly by a defendant in the future, we will be there,” Wilcox said.

Illegal immigration has once again become a national hot button topic after President Trump's pledge to build a wall on the southern border.

Democratic cities and states have established "sanctuary cities," which allow illegals to stay and avoid immigration enforcement.

It is still unclear how the Supreme Court's ruling will impact sanctuary cities, but it suggests that their days may be numbered.