U.S. top court tosses ruling against illegal immigration encouragement law

By Andrew Chung
May 7 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday threw
out a lower court ruling that had invalidated a decades-old
federal law defended by President Donald Trump's administration
that makes it a felony to encourage illegal immigration.
The high court, ruling 9-0, did not resolve the legal merits
of the dispute but faulted the 2018 decision by the San
Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as an
overreach. The justices found that the 9th Circuit had based its
decision on an issue never presented in the California case -
the question of whether the law at issue was overly broad.
The Supreme Court, in its tersely worded ruling written by
liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sent the case back to the
9th Circuit to start its work again. Ginsburg wrote that the
lower court's "radical transformation of this case goes well
beyond the pale."
The 9th Circuit struck down the law as a violation of the
U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of free speech
because it is overly broad, criminalizing a wide array of
ordinary conversations and advice. The 9th Circuit found that
the law could criminalize even simple speech, such as a
grandmother suggesting to her relative whose visa had expired to
stay in the country.
The Trump administration, in its appeal of the 9th Circuit
ruling, argued that the law was not meant to criminalize
protected speech, but rather to stop people who would facilitate
or solicit illegal immigration and enrich themselves by doing
so.
The case centered on the prosecution of a U.S. citizen named
Evelyn Sineneng-Smith, who ran an immigration consultancy in San
Jose, California that primarily served Filipinos who worked as
home healthcare providers.
But neither side in the case had presented arguments over
whether the law was overly broad, Ginsburg said. Instead, the
appeals court itself introduced that issue.
"No extraordinary circumstances justified the panel's
takeover of the appeal," Ginsburg said.
Federal prosecutors in 2010 accused Sineneng-Smith of duping
illegal migrants into paying her to file frivolous visa
applications while remaining in the country indefinitely.
Sineneng-Smith was convicted in 2013 of violating the
encouragement law, as well as mail fraud. She was sentenced to
18 months in prison and three years of supervised release.
Trump has made restricting both legal and illegal
immigration a centerpiece of his presidency and his campaign for
re-election on Nov. 3.

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