Rodriguez-Sosa v. Whitaker

Background

Montserrat Jael Rodriguez-Sosa entered the United States in July 2000 without admission or parole. After her 2015 perjury conviction, Immigration and Customs Enforcement alleged that she was removable as an immigrant convicted of an aggravated felony, and arrested her on July 22, 2016.

Rodriguez-Sosa sought protection from removal through a U-Visa application, and later applied for asylum and withholding of removal before an immigration judge. She withdrew her withholding application without prejudice while awaiting action on her U-Visa application. In May 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told her that her petition appeared to show eligibility for a U-Visa. The agency gave her deferred action and placed her on a waiting list, but the letter did not stay her removal.

Her immigration proceedings were later reopened and re-calendared. On May 22, 2018, the immigration judge denied her remaining requests for relief from removal. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed on November 9, 2018, creating a final removal order. The opinion states that Rodriguez-Sosa was seeking review of that order but had not yet filed for a stay in the Eighth Circuit.

Requests and jurisdiction

Rodriguez-Sosa moved for a preliminary injunction and an emergency temporary restraining order. She sought to prevent the government from removing her while she pursued relief in the Eighth Circuit, to stop her removal while the district court considered her petition challenging detention and removal, and to stop her continued detention.

The government argued that the district court lacked authority to review the removal order and that her continued detention was constitutional under 8 U.S.C. § 1231. Rodriguez-Sosa characterized her claims as a challenge to a government policy under the Administrative Procedure Act and as a constitutional challenge to her detention under the Fifth Amendment.

The court held that immigration law makes a petition for review in the appropriate court of appeals the sole and exclusive method for judicial review of a removal order. It concluded that Rodriguez-Sosa’s claims concerning deferred action and the government’s policy change directly arose from her removal order. As a result, the district court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction—legal authority to hear the matter—to decide the requested emergency relief or the merits of those claims.

Habeas petition

The court reached the same jurisdictional conclusion regarding Rodriguez-Sosa’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which is a request for judicial relief from allegedly unlawful custody or detention. The court determined that the petition also challenged the final removal order. Under the cited law, a district court must transfer such a petition to the appropriate court of appeals.

Disposition

The court did not decide whether Rodriguez-Sosa’s removal, detention, deferred-action status, or the government’s policy was lawful. It ordered that her Motion for Preliminary Injunction and Emergency Temporary Restraining Order be DENIED without prejudice and that the Clerk of Court TRANSFER the action to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The ruling is classified as a procedural order because it rested on lack of subject-matter jurisdiction rather than a decision on the underlying claims.