Williams v. Sessions

Background

Mark Williams entered the United States in 1997 as a stowaway and initially claimed to be a citizen of Liberia. An immigration judge granted him asylum in 1998. After Williams was convicted of gross sexual imposition, the immigration judge reopened the asylum proceeding, later denied asylum and other protection from removal, and ordered Williams removed from the United States.

Williams completed his criminal sentence in March 2014 and was transferred to federal immigration custody. Officials released him under supervision in September 2014 because removal to Liberia did not appear likely in the foreseeable future. After later criminal convictions, Williams returned to immigration custody in February 2018. He remained detained under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(6), which permits detention of certain people ordered removed, including some people with criminal convictions and those considered risks to the community.

Officials had difficulty obtaining travel documents because Williams gave differing information about his parents, hometown, language, schooling, identity, and citizenship. Liberia had not issued a final refusal to provide a travel document, but its embassy questioned whether Williams was Liberian and suggested he might be from Nigeria. Nigeria declined to interview him or consider a travel-document request. Officials also found information suggesting that a Ghanaian named Mark Williams might be the petitioner, although the record lacked a photograph or other biometric information confirming that identity. Officials were working with Ghana to secure his repatriation.

Williams’s Petition and the Legal Standard

Williams filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, a procedure allowing a person to challenge unlawful detention and seek release. He argued that the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause prohibited indefinite immigration detention while a removal order remained unexecuted. Williams asserted that Liberia had told him it could not issue a travel document in the reasonably foreseeable future.

The government argued that continued detention was constitutional and that removal to Liberia or Ghana was reasonably foreseeable. It also argued that any delay resulted from Williams’s repeated misrepresentations about his background, identity, and citizenship.

The court applied the Supreme Court’s rule that detention after a removal order is presumptively reasonable for up to six months. After that period, a detained person may seek conditional release by showing good reason to believe that removal is not significantly likely in the reasonably foreseeable future. The government must then provide evidence rebutting that showing. The court noted that a person may be detained longer when the person’s lack of cooperation or active obstruction controls the timing of removal.

Court’s Analysis

The court concluded that Williams had not shown that no country was likely to accept him. If Williams was Ghanaian, the government was working with the Ghanaian Embassy, which regularly processed travel documents for its citizens. If Williams was Liberian, the Liberian Embassy had not finally denied a travel document and issued such documents even to citizens without Liberian passports. The court also found that the record did not show that political conditions in Liberia or Ghana made removal virtually impossible, and that the delay did not support an inference that travel documents would never be issued.

The court attributed the delay, to the extent there was one, to Williams’s pattern of providing contradictory or disingenuous information. It stated that the record and Williams’s conduct created a strong suspicion that he was obstructing removal to obtain conditional release. The court said it could not conclude that his detention violated the Fifth Amendment unless it was confident that he was participating in the removal process in good faith.

Disposition

The court denied Williams’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus. It also ordered that the case be dismissed with prejudice and directed entry of judgment.