United States v. Delgado-Garcia, Jose

The court today interprets two provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act as criminalizing conduct outside of the United States by foreign nationals. In doing so, the court ignores clear instruction from the Supreme Court that Congress must clearly state its intention to apply statutes extraterritorially and that otherwise courts are to interpret ambiguous statutes as territorially limited. Congress has not clearly stated its intent to apply the attempted bringing and the encouragement/indueement provisions of 8 U.S.C. § 1324 extraterritorially in order to protect United States…