Supreme Court shuts door on longtime Utah immigrant

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Mexican immigrant deported after spending two decades in Utah — and marrying a U.S. citizen — wasn't entitled to return to this country.

The decision affects thousands of people in circumstances similar to those of Humberto Fernandez-Vargas, said his Washington, D.C., lawyer, David Gossett.

Fernandez-Vargas was deported in 2004 after crossing the border from Mexico, most recently in 1981. He lived mostly in Ogden, ran a trucking business and married his longtime companion, a U.S. citizen, in 2001. They have a son, now a teenager.

Fernandez-Vargas applied for a green card based on his marriage to Rita Fernandez. Instead, he was arrested and jailed after a routine interview with immigration agents and sent back to Mexico under a 21-year-old deportation order.

"We certainly plan to work the system to get him relief," Gossett said Thursday.

By law, Fernandez-Vargas can't apply to re-enter the country for 20 years, but his lawyer said the Supreme Court noted he was a good candidate for a bureaucratic waiver to that rule.

Gossett said no deal was in the works for special legislation from Utah's congressional delegation in an election year.

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Fernandez-Vargas was subject to a 1996 law Congress passed to streamline the legal process for expelling aliens who have been deported at least once before and returned. Fernandez-Vargas had been deported three times before, from the 1970s to 1981.

Justices said the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act revoked Fernandez-Vargas's right to appeal the final deportation order, in 2004.

Fernandez-Vargas' lawyer had argued that the 1996 law should not be applied to him because he last entered America more than a decade before Congress passed the law.

That argument didn't work at the nation's high court.

"Fernandez-Vargas continued to violate the law by remaining in this country day after day and ... the United States was entitled to bring that continuing violation to an end," Justice David Souter wrote in the decision.

Souter said that unlawful immigrants like Fernandez-Vargas should have known about the 1996 law and taken "advantage of a grace period."

The case is Fernandez-Vargas v. Gonzales, 04-1376.

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