IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE V. ST. CYR (2001)

Enrico St. Cyr’s victory in Immigration and Naturalization Service v. St. Cyr represented the first time in over a decade that an immigrant prevailed over the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) before the Supreme Court. The case, argued by the director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, Lucas Guttentag, stood as a powerful preservation of noncitizens’ habeas rights.

The INS soon ceased to exist. The post-9/11 creation of the Department of Homeland Security divided its powers between US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). St. Cyr, however, provided critical precedent for later cases, especially Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Boumediene v. Bush (2008), that addressed and protected habeas rights for Guantánamo Bay detainees.