In a second round of U.S. Supreme Court proceedings in Mellouli v. Lynch, our firm sought a rare writ of mandamus to enforce the Court’s previous mandate that a legal permanent resident may not be deported for a drug conviction unless that conviction necessarily involves a drug covered by the federal Controlled Substances Act, which Mellouli’s conviction did not.
On our motion, the Court issued a stay of further proceedings pending its decision on mandamus, and the government then agreed to settle the case. The Supreme Court has not issued a writ of mandamus in recent decades, and had stayed proceedings pending mandamus on only one occasion in many years.
