Immigration law and the Supreme Court

DESCRIPTION: Statutes that regulate the entry of non–US citizens into the United States.

SIGNIFICANCE: The Supreme Court recognizes the right of Congress to regulate immigration and affirmed the restriction of regulation of immigration to the federal government. The court, however, has placed some constitutional limitations on the enforcement of immigration laws within the territorial boundaries of the United States.

The Supreme Court has less control over immigration law than over almost any other area of the legal system because congressional power over immigration into the country is considered part of the nation’s sovereignty. During the first hundred years of US history, there were few immigration laws to concern the court. With the exception of the short-lived and controversial Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which gave the president power to deport immigrants judged to be dangerous, the federal government made little effort to regulate immigration. Congress did not even create a federal bureau to deal with questions of immigration until 1864, when it appropriated funds for a commissioner of immigration and a staff of five officials to assist immigrants with transportation and settlement problems.

Despite its relative lack of involvement in questions of immigration, though, the Supreme Court did help lay the groundwork for federal control of the entry of non–US citizens into the United States. As numbers of immigrants increased, states with large ports that served as points of entry began issuing their own regulations. New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Massachusetts set health standards for new arrivals and taxed shipmasters. In 1876 the issue of state control of immigrants came before the Supreme Court in the case of Henderson v. Mayor of New York. The court ruled that state regulatory statutes covering immigration violated Congress’s power in interstate commerce. This judicial decision encouraged those interested in regulating immigration to seek federal laws that would replace the state statutes struck down by the court. The Immigration Act of 1875 was a modest piece of legislation concerned with Asian laborers, but it did mark a historic turn because it signaled the end of the period of unrestricted migration to the United States.

Congressional Power

Congress replaced older state regulations by imposing a duty of fifty cents per foreign passenger on ships bringing in passengers from foreign countries. In the Head Money Cases (1884) also known as Edye & Another v. Robertson, the Supreme Court held that this was a valid exercise of the right of Congress to regulate commerce.

One of the earliest pieces of major immigration legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chinese laborers had been arriving in the United States since 1849, when people in China received word of the California gold rush. Although Chinese workers had helped build the nation’s railroads, as the numbers of immigrants from China increased, hostility toward them also grew. The Exclusion Act banned most new migration from China. The Supreme Court upheld the right of Congress to exclude entire groups of people from entering the country in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) and Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), citing the jurisdiction of the United States over its own territory as justification.

The right of Congress to act as a sovereign government has enabled Congress to bar the entry of certain groups of people, including those convicted of crimes, sex workers, and people who hold objectionable political beliefs. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld these exclusions. Although US immigration law no longer discriminates on the basis of race, this has not been a result of any action of the court but because of laws passed by Congress.

Immigrants on US Soil

Deportation is the act of sending a noncitizen who has entered the United States, either legally or illegally, then been denied the right to remain, back to their country of origin. The Supreme Court officially recognized the right of Congress to enact deportation laws in the case Nishimura Ekiu v. United States (1892). The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, made immigrants subject to exclusion and deportation for political activities, including membership in the Communist Party or Nazi Party. In Galvan v. Press (1954), the court upheld the deportation of noncitizen Juan Galvan for having been a member of the Communist Party, even though it was a legal party when Galvan belonged.

Although the Supreme Court has recognized the right of Congress to establish and enforce immigration policy, it has sometimes restricted the immigration activities of the government when the immigrants are actually inside US territory. In Wong Yang Sung v. McGrath (1950), Carlson v. Landon (1952), Marcello v. Bonds (1955), Abel v. United States (1960), and Kimm v. Rosenberg (1960), the court found that immigrants facing deportation do enjoy some constitutional rights, such as Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of equal protection under the law and Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Similarly, the principle of freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures involved the Supreme Court in the enforcement of immigration law against undocumented immigrants in the case of Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973), in which the court ruled that officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service could not use roving patrols far from the border to stop vehicles without a warrant or probable cause.

In 2016 the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Sessions v. Morales-Santana, which concerned a relatively obscure citizenship law regarding how US citizenship is passed from parent to child. According to the law, a child of a US citizen who is born abroad can only be granted citizenship if the citizen parent physically lived in the United States (or outlying possessions) for a certain period of time before the birth—ten years at the time of concerned party Luis Ramón Morales-Santana's birth, later reduced to five years. The law made an exception for children of unwed US citizen mothers, who were only required to live in the United States for one year before the birth. Morales-Santana, the child of a US citizen father who was unwed at his birth, challenged his impending deportation on the grounds that having different standards for mothers and for fathers violated the Constitution's equal protection clause. The Supreme Court agreed unanimously in its 2017 decision that the disparity violated equal protection. However, the court also decided that because the one-year rule was an exception that applied only in a relatively few cases, while the vast majority of cases were subject to the longer time period, the proper course of action under existing laws was to apply the harsher rule universally rather than extend the exception to Morales-Santana's case. As a result, Morales-Santana would still be subject to deportation. In the majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that until Congress "settle[s] on a uniform prescription that neither favors nor disadvantages any person on the basis of gender," the five-year residency requirement should apply to children of unwed US citizen mothers going forward.

In another citizenship case, Maslenjak v. United States (2017), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a naturalized citizen may be stripped of US citizenship only if the person had obtained citizenship illegally and any fraudulent statements made had materially influenced the outcome toward naturalization. The majority opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, instituted a test to determine whether the misrepresentation would have ultimately led to disqualification.

Limits on deportation made their way before the court in the late 2010s and into the 2020s as undocumented immigration remained a major issue of public debate. The Supreme Court reaffirmed the doctrine of void for vagueness, established in 2015, in order to protect individuals against arbitrary enforcement of overly vague definitions of violent crime in its 2018 decision Sessions v. Dimaya. The case reviewed a law making an “aggravated felony,” including an undefined “crime of violence,” a deportable offense. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that such vagueness violated immigrants' rights to due process, which the Supreme Court upheld. Justice Neil Gorsuch further noted that it is the responsibility of Congress, not the courts, to define what constitutes a crime of violence.

Indefinite detention of undocumented migrants and the difficulty of their filing habeas corpus petitions were also addressed in the review of a Ninth Circuit Court ruling that periodic bond hearings are constitutionally required and that ongoing detention may be justified only for flight risks or those dangerous to the community. According to the Supreme Court's 5–3 decision in Jennings vs. Rodriguez (2018), however, there are no time limits on detention and no requirement for bond hearings, thus noncitizens may be detained indefinitely. This was supported by the conservative majority's 6–3 decision in Johnson v. Guzman-Chavez (2021) specifically regarding detainees who claimed risk of persecution or torture in their native country.

Other immigration cases included Pereira v. Sessions (2018) and Niz-Chavez v. Garland (2021), which regarded details of the procedures and time frames for deportation. Sanchez v. Mayorkas (2021) found that undocumented immigrants with Temporary Protected Status were not eligible for green card applications to become permanent residents.

The administration of President Donald Trump instituted a policy in early 2019 mandating that a large number of people coming to the southern border of the United States seeking asylum remain in Mexico until a scheduled hearing could occur. Though, after thousands had been forced to comply, President Joe Biden attempted to end the implementation of the policy upon his inauguration in early 2021, by the end of that year legal challenges resulted in a lower-court-ordered resumption. However, upon hearing arguments in 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in Biden v. Texas that Biden's administration did, according to federal immigration law, have the ability to end the program as the provision made the return of immigrants discretionary rather than mandatory. Around the same time, the court ruled in Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez that federal law did not require the government to conduct bond hearings for noncitizens who had been detained during immigration proceedings for at least six months, meaning that people could be kept in detention indefinitely. Additionally, the case of Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez ended with the court's decision denying immigrants the ability to secure injunctive relief against immigration policies as a class.

In 2024 the Supreme Court ruled on the issue of marriage as it related to noncitizens. In Department of State v. Muñoz, the court ruled 6–3 against a California woman who claimed that the federal government's denial of a visa for her husband from El Salvador violated her constitutional rights. Critics viewed the decision as a setback for Americans who wish to marry and bring immigrant spouses into the US, as it rejected the idea that US citizens have a constitutional right to do so.

Bibliography

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Castillo, Andrea. "Supreme Court Rules Against Los Angeles Couple Denied Visa in Part over Husband's Tattoos." Los Angeles Times, 21 June 2024, www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-06-21/supreme-court-los-angeles-couple-denied-visa. Accessed 1 July 2024.

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