US judge finds felony deportation law unconstitutional

LAS VEGAS (AP) – In a court ruling with potentially far-reaching implications for U.S. immigration cases, a federal judge in Nevada found that a criminal law dating from 1929 makes the return of a deported person to the United States a crime.

US District Judge Miranda Du in Reno found in a ruling passed on Wednesday that the law, widely known as Section 1326, is of “racist, nativist roots” and that Mexican and Latinx people are in violation of the Fifth’s equality clause Constitutional amendment discriminated.

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“Everyone who works in federal courts knows the law,” said Franny Forsman, former chief of the retired federal defender in Nevada, on Thursday. “There are really a large number of cases that have been brought under this section over the years. Mostly they are public defenders. “

A law with “an incredibly racist history”

Section 1326 of the Immigration and Nationality Act makes it a criminal offense for a person to enter the United States if they have been refused entry, deported, or deported. It was enacted in 1952 using the language from the Unwanted Aliens Act passed by Congress in 1929. The penalties were increased five times between 1988 and 1996 to increase its dissuasive value.

Forsman said she expected the government to appeal to the US 9th Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

But Julian Castro, secretary of housing and urban development in the Obama administration, tweeted that he doubted the Justice Department would want to defend a law with an “incredibly racist history.”

Acting US attorney Christopher Chiou and an aide did not immediately respond to news of the verdict.

Forsman called Dus’s assignment groundbreaking because of its thoroughness. You, a Vietnamese immigrant, was nominated for the Bundesbank by President Barack Obama and sworn in in 2012.

“I think it will have an impact because it will be difficult to get around their reasoning,” Forsman said of the court order. “It’s a bit difficult to get around a law called the Wetback Act by the people who made it.” The derogatory term often refers to illegally entered Mexican migrants, but is also used to refer to all Hispanics to belittle.

FILE – This Thursday June 10, 2021 file photo, a pair of migrant families from Brazil pass a gap in the border wall to reach the United States to seek asylum after crossing from Mexico to Yuma, Arizona. The Biden government proposed on Wednesday August 18 to change the way asylum applications are handled in order to reduce a huge backlog of cases on the southwest border that has left people on it for years waiting to find out if they will be allowed to stay in the U.S. (AP Photo / Eugene Garcia, file)

The law places a greater burden on Mexican and Latinx people

Du said she took into account written and oral arguments and expert testimony on the legislative history of the law from Professors Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien of San Diego State University and Kelly Lytle Hernández of the University of California at Los Angeles.

“What is important is that the government does not deny that Section 1326 hits Mexican and Latinx people more severely,” said the judge in her 43-page order that dismissed the June 2020 criminal charges against Gustavo Carrillo-Lopez.

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Carrillo-Lopez was arrested in Nevada in 2019 after being deported in 1999 and 2012, according to prosecutors. His Reno federal defender Lauren Gorman did not immediately respond to an email Thursday.

The judge said she had not seen publicly available data on the national origins of those persecuted under Section 1326, but cited statistics from the U.S. Border Protection Agency that showed that more than 97% of those who were persecuted in 2000 were Border arrests were of Mexican ancestry, 86% in 2005. and 87% in 2010.

“The government argues that the impact reported is ‘a product of geography, not discrimination,’ and that the statistics are more a characteristic of Mexico’s proximity to the United States, the history of Mexican employment patterns, and the socio-political and economic factors driving migration drive forward, ”you wrote. “The court is not convinced.”

This story has been corrected to show that Castro was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, not the Biden administration.

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