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Vanderbilt Law Review

First Page

375

Abstract

On its face, the Form I-213 appears to be a humble bureaucratic form unremarkable to the untrained eye. In reality, this document alone can singularly sustain the federal government’s case for the deportation of a noncitizen in removal proceedings. The Form I-213 sits at the cradle of interlocking judicial and procedural norms within immigration practice that largely diminish the due process rights of noncitizens facing deportation. This Article sheds light on two important but relatively underexamined phenomena that undergird this system: how a disregard for evidentiary rules largely eliminates the government’s burden of proof in removal proceedings and how judicial deference to government agents systemically enables this practice.

This Article explores the foregoing dynamic through the lens of the Form I-213, a government form generated by federal immigration officials that is frequently used to demonstrate a noncitizen’s deportability. Instead of holding federal immigration agents to basic standards of evidentiary practice, the immigration courts deftly formulated a special evidentiary rule to ensure the routine admissibility of the Form I-213, deeming it an “inherently reliable” document. Every circuit court to have considered this issue categorically adopted the inherent reliability rule, generally without analysis or consideration of the liberty interests at stake for individuals facing deportation. While the federal government carries the initial burden of proof in removal proceedings, this burden is rendered meaningless when government agents can generate dispositive evidence, knowing that judicially constructed evidentiary rules render such evidence admissible as a matter of course. When removal proceedings are predicated on such a power asymmetry from the outset, noncitizens facing deportation start off even more deprived of due process than the statutory scheme envisions.

The construction of this rule that provides special treatment to Form I213s, and its unblinking acceptance by the federal courts, is emblematic of how due process deficiencies in administrative courts can become so embedded in practice that they largely go unnoticed. Despite the fact that a legal framework exists for evaluating the sufficiency of procedural rules in protecting due process rights of individuals in administrative hearings, these practices often charge forward in the name of efficiency without any meaningful evaluation of the due process implications. By deeply exploring constructs like the inherent reliability rule that have been unquestioningly adopted by administrative adjudicators and the federal courts alike, we can more effectively calibrate the optimal balance between achieving efficiency and protecting the liberty interests at stake for those in administrative proceedings.

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