Professor Gabriel "Jack" Chin has penned an essay for Talking Points Memo on birthright citizenship, pointing out that the heated rhetoric over the citizenship of children of undocumented immigrants is far from new. "The citizenship status of every non-white racial group has been challenged for literally centuries," he writes.
An excerpt from his piece titled, "America Has Freaked Out Over Birthright Citizenship For Centuries":
Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court provided Moones Mellouli, a lawful permanent resident who had been ordered removed from the United States, with a victory in his efforts to reverse a removal order. The Court held that "[f]ederal law ([8 U.S.C.] 1227(a)(2)(B)(i) . . . did not authorize Mellouli's removal." It did not remand the case to the court of appeals or the Board of Immigration Appeals for further proceedings, thereby suggesting that the case had come to an end. Nonetheless, there now is a squabble between Mellouli and the U.S.
Today, a splintered Supreme Court issued a ruling in Kerry v. Din. The case raised the question of the continuing vitality of the doctrine of consular non-reviewability and its prohibition of judicial review of visa denials by Department of State consular officers.
Today, the Supreme Court decidedMellouli v. Lynch, a case involving the removal from the United States of Moones Mellouli, a lawful permanent resident from Tunisia, based on a Kansas misdemeanor drug paraphernalia conviction for possession of a sock used to hide four tablets of the prescription drug Adderall.
Kevin Johnson, who covers the Court’s immigration docket for SCOTUSblog, has posted an article analyzing trends in Supreme Court immigration cases over the last five years. Although the Supreme Court has frequently departed from the normal rules of constitutional and statutory interpretation in immigration cases, Dean Johnson’s study of the 2009 through 2013 Terms suggests that “immigration exceptionalism” may be on its way out.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the much-anticipated immigration case of Kerry v. Din. In that case, the U.S. government - in the face of strong academic commentary to the contrary - steadfastly defends the doctrine of consular non-reviewability and its bar to the judicial review of visa decisions of Department of State consular officers.
The well-established doctrine of consular non-reviewability precludes judicial review of the visa decisions of State Department consular officers. It is a first cousin of immigration law's exceptional "plenary power" doctrine, which generally immunizes from judicial review the substantive immigration decisions of Congress and the executive branch. In refusing to disturb the federal government's reliance on secret evidence to deny the non-citizen spouse of a U.S.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Mellouli v. Holder, a challenge to the removal of Moones Mellouli, a lawful permanent resident from Tunisia, based on a Kansas misdemeanor drug paraphernalia conviction for possession of a sock used to hide drugs. The record of his conviction, the touchstone in removal proceedings, did not specify the controlled substance connected to Mellouli’s “drug paraphernalia.”
On January 14, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Mellouli v. Holder, one of several recent cases in which the Court has scrutinized the federal government's efforts to remove a lawful permanent resident from the United States based on a minor drug conviction. The frequency with which these kinds of cases recur reflects the focus of the Obama administration's removal efforts on noncitizens who have had brushes with the criminal justice system.
