The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari in Walters v. Reno, leaving intact the Ninth Circuit’s nationwide injunction against Immigration and Naturalization Service civil document fraud procedures (for more detail on this case, see "Ninth Circuit Upholds Nationwide Injunction of INS Civil Document Fraud Notice Forms and Procedures," Immigrants’ Rights Update, Jun. 17, 1998, p. 9).

The class action lawsuit challenged the INS’s implementation of section 274C of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which makes it unlawful to knowingly engage in certain types of immigration-related document fraud.  Before the injunction, the INS had been notifying individuals charged with civil document fraud by using forms that failed both to describe the nature of the charge and to make clear that, in order to protect their right to seek relief from deportation, respondents must make two separate requests for hearings.  In addition, with the exception of some INS districts that on their own initiative made Spanish translations, the INS had been using forms written only in English.

Both the district court and the Ninth Circuit determined that the INS’s 274C notice forms and procedures violated due process.  The Ninth Circuit’s opinion upheld the district court’s injunction in all respects save one: instead of requiring the INS to develop new forms in English and Spanish, the decision left it to the agency’s discretion in the first instance to develop an appropriate notice.