There was a victory for immigrants facing automatic deportation in the U.S. Supreme Court this week. 

The case was of an immigrant who had lived in the US since he was five, and had been deported after possessing one tablet of Xanax and serving a ten day sentence for the offense. The drug possession offense was his second after possessing marijuana a year earlier and serving a 20-day sentence.

Although the second offense had been ruled by the government as putting the man in the deportation category, the Supreme Court ruled that this was not what Congress had meant by automatic deportation for an immigrant convicted of an aggravated felony. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion for the case, and affirmed the decision by defining what Congress intended.

“We do not usually think of a 10-day sentence for the unauthorized possession of a trivial amount of a prescription drug as an ‘aggravated felony,’ ” Stevens wrote. Immigrants who break the law should receive the chance to plead their case before an immigration judge rather than face automatic deportation, he said.

This will mean immigrants can ask judges to take into account other factors besides the case when deciding whether or not to deport offenders, but illegal immigrants will most likely be automatically deported regardless. The court also allowed second chances in the case Holland v Florida, where a man was denied a review of his sentence for killing a police officer because his lawyer missed the filing deadline. The court said this was negligence by the law, and the defendant should not lose the opportunity to have his sentence reviewed because of his lawyer’s mistake. Justice Scalia wrote the dissenting opinion in the Holland case, and said that deadlines are there for a reason, and the petitioner was just plain “out of luck.”