Speech #980214188

The elimination of the class action provision would detract from the efficient and expeditious adjudication of legal issues and require repeated resort to timeconsuming individual actions with the resulting drain on judicial resources. The inability to obtain definitive judicial decisions involving large groups of people will encourage litigation and detract from the capacity of the Federal courts to impose uniform national standards. Under section 123. the service of a petition for judicial review operates as a stay of the exclusion or deportation of an alien pending determination of the petition by the court. unless the court otherwise directs. The McCollum amendment limits the automatic stay to cases involving judicial review of orders of deportation. I favor the current language because the physical removal of a person from the United States with a pending petition in an exclusion case undercuts the value of the judicial remedy in spite of the fact that an administrative adjudicator may have acted improperly. Section 123 already provides sufficient protection against the possibility that aliens will prolong their stays in the United States by filing frivolous appeals.