In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court in 2024 over-ruled the foundational administrative law decision of Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. Since 1984, Chevron had required courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous provisions of statutes that they administered. Courts again have the final say on the meaning of the law.

Liberal commentators lament the end of Chevron deference and complain that the Court is imposing conservative control over the administrative state. However, whatever the overall political impacts, Chevron was no friend to noncitizens. Deference generally meant that courts upheld the U.S. administrative agencies’ interpretation of the immigration statute and agency orders of removal of noncitizens from the United States.

Of course, removal adjudications, which determine whether noncitizens may live in the United States, were not at issue in Chevron, a technical environmental law case involving a pollution emissions rule. The review of removal adjudications differs from the exercise of a cost/benefit analysis to fashion rules and regulations designed to protect the environment. Through an immigration bureaucracy with the power to remove noncitizens from the United States or grant them relief from removal, such as asylum, attorneys for the U.S. government pursue the removal of noncitizens and attempt to restrict relief from removal provided by the immigration statute passed by Congress. Agencies in the Executive Branch decide those matters. In that bureaucratic landscape, Chevron deference for years had adverse consequences on noncitizens, the majority of whom are people of color from the developing world.

This Essay evaluates how the Supreme Court’s overruling of Chevron will affect judicial review of agency immigration adjudications and may benefit noncitizens by allowing the courts to have the final word on the meaning of the law. It concludes that, even if the Court’s elimination of Chevron deference does not ultimately improve matters for noncitizens, independent interpretations of the immigration statute by the courts cannot possibly have more negative impacts than the era of deference.

Continue reading The Meaning of the End of Chevron for Immigration Removal Adjudications