Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, Division C of, made major changes to the Immigration and Nationality Act of the United States, which the bill's proponents argued was mainly because of the rapidly-growing undocumented immigrant population in the country. "These IIRIRA changes became effective on April 1, 1997." Among the obvious changes made by the IIRIRA, the US Congress expanded the definition of the term aggravated felony by entailing a great many more crimes but also explicitly stated that the term "aggravated felony" must be applied only to convictions "for which the term of imprisonment was completed within the previous 15 years." This appears to be perfectly consistent with "the Fifth, Eighth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution," including with the United Nations Convention against Torture. The IIRIRA combined the former "deportation proceedings" and "exclusion proceedings" into a single removal proceedings, which begin in immigration courts and may reach all the way up to the US Supreme Court. In the meantime, Congress reaffirmed its historical statutory and mandatory relief to everyone who was admitted to the United States as a refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157. Every illegal alien convicted of any aggravated felony is to be placed in expedited removal proceedings. In exceptional circumstances, the removal proceedings can be reopened at any time and even from outside the United States. That had never been clarified prior to IIRIRA. US President Bill Clinton asserted that the legislation strengthened "the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, in the workplace, and in the criminal justice system — without punishing those living in the United States legally." Some critics have argued that it punished US citizens and noncitizens of all statuses "by eliminating due process from the overwhelming majority of removal cases and curtailing equitable relief from removal." Among other changes, IIRIRA gave the US Attorney General broad authority to construct barriers along the border between the United States and Mexico, and it authorized the construction of a secondary layer of border fencing to support the already-completed 14-mile primary fence. Construction of the secondary fence stalled because of environmental concerns raised by the California Coastal Commission.
Deportation and inadmissibility issues
According to the INA, the terms "inadmissible aliens" and "deportable aliens" are synonymous. A lawful permanent resident can either be an "alien" or a "national of the United States," which requires a case-by-case analysis and depends mainly on the number of continuous years he or she has spent in the United States as a legal immigrant. IIRIRA sufficiently protected every American against deportation from United States. In IIRIRA, Congress expressly states that the aggravated felony definition must be applied retroactively to all persons, and reaffirms its historical statutory and mandatory relief to those persons who were admitted to the United States as refugees under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, even if they have been convicted of a particularly serious crime. The Board of Immigration Appeals and the U.S. courts of appeals have held that for purposes of cancellation of removal and waivers of inadmissibility, the "stop-time rule" does not apply to any alien who committed his or her crime prior to April 1, 1997. In other words, an LPR who committed a crime before IIRIRA's effective date was still effectively an LPR. This does not come into conflict with the aggravated felony definition, which plainly requires a conviction. In INS v. St. Cyr, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Congress had not intended IIRIRA to be applied retroactively against all past criminal convictions. The BIA extended relief against deportation to green card holders who had been convicted of an aggravated felony prior to April 1, 1997. This BIA decision, however, plainly contradicts IIRIRA, which expressly states the following: "The ordinary meaning of 'notwithstanding' is 'in spite of,' or 'without prevention or obstruction from or by.'" IIRIRA's mandatory detention provisions have also been repeatedly challenged, with less success. The Reed Amendment also has been attacked as unconstitutional. In Zadvydas v. Davis, the Supreme Court curtailed the government's ability to hold aliens in removal proceedings indefinitely. A similar detention issue was addressed in Jennings v. Rodriguez.
Upon passage of this law, states were restricted from offering in-state tuition at public institutions to students who were not legally in the country. Specifically, if a state allows undocumented immigrant students to be eligible for in-state tuition, then residents from other states must also be eligible for in-state tuition. Several states have passed tuition-equality laws by allowing anyone regardless of legal status to apply for in-state tuition if they meet the state's eligibility requirements.
Impact
A 2018 paper found that the Act reduced the health and mental health outcomes of Latin-American undocumented immigrants in the United States by escalating their fear that they would be deported.
