The wife of a former Taliban associate has been blocked from suing over his US visa denial by the Ninth Circuit, reports Court House News Service.
Fauzia Din sought a visa for her Afghan citizen husband, Kanishka Berashk, a month after they were married in 2006.
Berashk answered all questions truthfully during his interview at the US Embassy in Islamabad, including those about his occupation during the time of the Taliban regime, where he worked as a payroll clerk for the Afghan Ministry of Social Welfare.
He was told he could expect his visa in two to six weeks, but despite several attempts to understand the delay, he learned nine months later that his visa had been denied.
US immigration lawyers in Thailand Chaninat and Leeds have decades of experience in handling US visas for spouses and family members.
The government cited the Immigration and Nationality Act that prohibits visa applicants who have links to terrorism-related activity. He was told that the decision was implacable and despite Din and her attorney trying to learn more, the Embassy declined to “provide a detailed explanation of the reasons for the denial.”
Din claimed that the visa denial “deprived her of her constitutional right to live in the United States with her spouse.”
But Justice Antonin Scalia wrote:
“There is no such constitutional right […] What Justice Breyer’s dissent strangely describes as a ‘deprivation of her freedom to live together with her spouse in America,’ is, in any world other than the artificial world of ever-expanding constitutional rights, nothing more than a deprivation of her spouse’s freedom to immigrate into America.”
He continued:
“A claim that it deprived her of liberty is equally absurd […] The government has not ‘taken or imprisoned’ Din, nor has it ‘confine[d]’ her, either by ‘keeping [her] against h[er] will in a private house, putting h[er] in the stocks, arresting or forcibly detaining h[er] in the street.’ Indeed, not even Berashk has suffered a deprivation of liberty so understood.”
The Ninth Circuit confirmed the dismissal of Din’s claim today.
See more here.
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