"Any alien may apply for asylum, without exception," Ms. Lagoa said.
And the statute plainly says that such an alien "may apply for asylum".
Instead, it turned a deportation decision into a "sport of chance," like "flipping a coin — heads an alien may apply for relief, tails he may not".
Mr. Eig and other lawyers said they were still hopeful that Elian could somehow win an asylum hearing, saying that immigration laws allow any "alien" to apply for asylum, even children.
The judgment also reversed a trend of the past few decades, which has seen courts, including the Supreme Court, extend many of the constitutional rights enjoyed by citizens to aliens too.Although it applies only to illegal aliens, the ruling hands much more discretion to the INS, and is likely to intimidate legal immigrants as well.
Since the 1990s, however, controversy has arisen over the longstanding practice of granting automatic citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, and legal scholars disagree over whether the Wong Kim Ark precedent applies when alien parents are in the country illegally.
Detention is not limited to dangerous criminal aliens or those found likely to flee, but applies to all aliens claimed to be deportable for criminal convictions, even where the underlying offenses are minor.
James Ho considers Plyer v. Doe to have "put to rest" any doubt over whether the sweeping language regarding jurisdiction in Wong Kim Ark applies to all aliens, even illegal aliens.
In 1997 Mr. Rios, a legally admitted alien from Mexico, applied to become a U.S. citizen.
This aspect of "Chinese sociology" is one in which its practitioners are concerned not simply to apply alien sociological concepts to questions concerning the analysis of Chinese culture but to introduce Chinese concepts, in this case the concept of face, to English-language sociology sources.
