Brett Kavanaugh’s court record on Immigration

Because the federal D.C. Circuit rarely hears cases directly involving immigration law, Kavanaugh has only written three opinions in cases involving immigrants. All three opinions were dissents, where Kavanaugh stated that he believed the immigrant should have lost the case.

In 2008, Kavanaugh issued his first major dissent in a case involving immigrants. In Agri Processing Co. Inc, v. National Labor Relations Board, Kavanaugh declared that undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to labor-law protections because they were not legally permitted to be “employees.”

Even though the Supreme Court had years before declared that undocumented immigrants were “employees” for the purposes of labor law, Kavanaugh argued that a 1986 law making it a crime to employ undocumented immigrants had implicitly overruled the Supreme Court. The majority on the D.C. Circuit called his reasoning illogical and accused him of misapplying principles of statutory interpretation.

Next, in 2014, Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion in Fogo de Chao Holdings Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In that case, Washington, DC restaurant Fogo de Chao applied for an L-1 visa to bring a chef from Brazil to the United States. Fogo de Chao argued that the chef had “specialized knowledge” in churrascaria cooking and methods, a form of Brazilian barbecue that the restaurant is known for.

The government initially denied the chef’s visa. In overturning the denial, the D.C. Circuit criticized the government’s “wooden refusal” to consider that specialized knowledge might come from a person’s upbringing, family, and community tradition.

However, Judge Kavanaugh dissented strongly. He framed the dispute as simply about the restaurant “want[ing] to employ Brazilian chefs rather than American chefs,” and suggested that hiring such chefs was just trying to “cut labor costs masquerading as specialized knowledge.”

Finally, Judge Kavanaugh dissented in the 2017 case of Garza v. Hargan, in which an undocumented teenager sued the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement for preventing her from obtaining an abortion. He accused the majority of a “radical” expansion of the law, suggesting that the D.C Circuit had created a “new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.”

From here.

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